On her very first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a sweeping memorandum laying out what the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) enforcement priorities will be going forward under her leadership. It seems that the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) will not be among those priorities, or, at least, the focus of FARA criminal enforcement efforts will be much narrower than it was during not only the Biden Administration but also the first Trump Administration.

First, the Attorney General has disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, established in 2017 by then-FBI Director Chris Wray to counter Russia’s attempts to influence U.S. elections and undermine democratic institutions and values. (The task force later expanded its focus to include similar malign foreign influence operations by China, Iran, and other U.S. adversaries).

Second, the Corporate Enforcement Unit within the National Security Division, the DOJ division that administers FARA, has also been disbanded, and its personnel are being reassigned.

Third, and most importantly here, criminal charges will now be brought under FARA only for “alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” An example would be the indictment of Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at think tanks in Washington and New York charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Korean government and who, among other things, allegedly passed on non-public U.S. government information to Korean intelligence officers.

Alleged conduct on the part of non-governmental foreign actors that is not similar to “traditional espionage,” for example, a foreign company’s lobbying U.S. government officials for favorable tariff treatment for its products, without registering under FARA or availing itself of the so called “commercial exemption” for those that register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), will be dealt with by means of only “civil enforcement, regulatory initiatives, and public guidance.”

The memorandum does not address the status of the proposed amendments to FARA that were published in the Federal Register in the final weeks of the Biden Administration and that are discussed in detail here. The comment period for this notice of proposed rulemaking was set to end on March 3, 2025, after which some version of the amendments, to the extent the comments may influence them, was eventually to be finalized and enacted.

But the “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review” memorandum that President Trump issued on Inauguration Day encompasses these proposed amendments. Paragraph 3 of that memorandum calls on agencies to consider postponing, for 60 days, the effective date of “…any rules that have been issued in any manner but have not taken effect, for the purpose of reviewing any questions of fact, law, and policy that the rules may raise.” If deemed necessary and legally permissible, the postponement can be extended beyond 60 days. “Rule” is defined to include notices of proposed rulemaking.

As explained here, the most notable proposed FARA amendments would narrow the commercial exemption, making it likelier, depending of course on the facts, that an agent of a foreign company seeking to influence the U.S. government for its commercial benefit could be criminally charged under the statute for failing to register under FARA or the LDA. Such narrowing would seem to be inconsistent with the policy laid out in the Attorney General’s memorandum, and, thus, be subject to the presidential memorandum’s call for a pause of at least 60 days for DOJ to determine whether it is in fact inconsistent. It seems unlikely, then, that the commercial exemption will be narrowed by the Trump DOJ, if ever, anytime soon.