The Department of Justice published new guidance in the Federal Register on Thursday directing federal agencies to conduct their business exclusively in English wherever possible, stating that “agencies should strive to operate solely in English.”
The guidance carves out exceptions for services required by law or necessary to carry out an agency’s core mission, but otherwise pushes agencies toward eliminating multilingual operations entirely.
A DOJ memorandum lists the categories of federal activity that should now be conducted in English only: official correspondence, regulations, public announcements, forms and applications, websites, educational materials, and internal communications.
Agencies are being told to review their existing multilingual assistance programs and determine whether they’re actually necessary. The guidance is blunt about what should happen if they’re not.
“If multilingual assistance is neither legally required nor necessary to accomplish the agency’s mission, then the agency should eliminate assistance in favor of English-only operations,” the guidance states.
This builds directly on President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, which made English the official language of the United States for the first time in the nation’s history. That order didn’t force agencies to drop their existing multilingual services — Thursday’s directive now pushes them to do exactly that.
Some agencies already moved before the directive landed. The Department of Housing and Urban Development scrapped its foreign-language services and communications in August. The Departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Treasury have started stripping non-English materials from their websites.
The directive marks the clearest signal yet that the administration intends to translate its English-official policy into concrete changes across the federal bureaucracy, rather than leaving it as a symbolic designation.
