Just a few days after the Senate unanimously passed a bill banning the Chinese-owned TikTok social media app from use by federal employees on government smartphones, Tuesday's announced $1.7 trillion omnibus spending proposal includes funding to expand that ban.
Reuters reports that the massive spending bill gives the White House Office of Management and Budget 60 days "to develop standards and guidelines for executive agencies requiring the removal."
The move comes after a Senate bipartisan measure, sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., unanimously passed a ban on Dec. 14. The ban covers the app's use by federal employees on government-owned smartphones.
"Last night, the Senate took the important step of unanimously on a bipartisan basis passing legislation to ban TikTok on all government devices," Hawley said in a Dec. 15 statement after the bill passed the chamber.
"Never has the security threat to the American people from the Chinese Communist Party been more grave, and never has the determination on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to leverage every possible asset, every possible platform to gather information, personal information from the American people, been more serious than it is now. That is why last night's action by this body is so critical."
That separate bill now goes to the House and has the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., Reuters reported.
The spending bill expands the effort to remove the app from all federal phones and block all federal personnel from using the Chinese-controlled ByteDance application.
On Monday, Louisiana and West Virginia joined a growing list of 19 states to fully or partially ban access to TikTok in the past several weeks, according to Reuters.
The bans come amid national security concerns about how TikTok plans to use the data it collects from the millions of Americans.
In a statement to The Hill last week, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said that politicians and the administration should finish a national security review of the app to see if there's a problem.
"Politicians with national security concerns should encourage the administration [of President Joe Biden] to conclude its national security review of TikTok," Oberwetter said in the statement last week.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week that the Biden administration will let Congress handle the issue.
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