Don’t Blame Trump: Signal Was Biden’s Idea

The facts are stubborn things. Before the Trump administration’s second act had even begun—before a single cabinet meeting was held or a secure line buzzed with incoming directives—Signal was already humming inside the machinery of American governance. The encrypted messaging app, lionized by privacy advocates and lamented by transparency watchdogs, was not some novelty smuggled into the West Wing under cover of chaos. It was, rather, a tool normalized under President Joe Biden, whose administration quietly blessed its use among White House officials and agency liaisons for reasons both pragmatic and political.

Let us begin by dispelling the fiction. The recent furor over Trump officials using Signal to coordinate timing of the response to Houthi aggression in the Red Sea has prompted breathless hand-wringing from the usual quarters. There is talk of secrecy, impropriety, even a shadow government whispering through disappearing messages. But what these critics omit—either from ignorance or design—is that Signal’s path to officialdom was paved not in January 2025, but in the years preceding it, under a Biden team that, while publicly wary of opaque channels, quietly encouraged their encrypted virtues.

The turning point was December 18, 2024. On that day, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, issued a document whose bureaucratic blandness masked its radical implications. Buried in its list of “Mobile Communications Best Practices” was this clear directive: senior officials should adopt an end-to-end encrypted messaging app—explicitly naming Signal—as a safeguard against foreign interception. The reason? China had been caught actively compromising U.S. mobile telecommunications. The memo did not suggest this was optional. It was a best practice, yes, but with the weight of a security imperative.

This alone is sufficient to demonstrate that Biden’s administration didn’t merely tolerate Signal—it endorsed it, in writing, for executive branch officials facing high-value cyber threats. But the trail extends deeper.

According to former Biden national security officials, Signal was installed on select White House phones and used—sparingly, but deliberately—for secure coordination. These were not back-channel negotiations or illicit policy directives. They were logistical nudges: a message to check the classified email server, a prompt to pick up a secure line, a coordination ping from an offsite staffer. In a post-SolarWinds, post-Pegasus world, where even ostensibly secure government systems were porous, the argument for using Signal for brief, ephemeral communication was not merely plausible. It was compelling.

Crucially, these practices were not hidden. They were structured within the guardrails of existing federal records laws. Signal was not to be used for anything constituting official decision-making or substantive policy discussion. These belonged, as they always had, to official email, secure voice, or classified systems—the so-called “high side.” But for urgent, time-sensitive coordination where speed and discretion were paramount, Signal emerged as a pragmatic complement.

The Pentagon itself recognized this shift. In 2023, the Department of Defense issued guidance permitting the use of Signal in limited contexts, while reaffirming that no non-public DoD information should be transmitted through such apps. This was not a loophole. It was an accommodation to the reality that modern executive operations required both agility and security—a combination difficult to achieve through legacy systems alone.

Now contrast this with the Trump transition. When the new team entered government in January 2025, they did not introduce Signal to federal operations; they encountered it. Career civil servants—those perennial guardians of bureaucratic continuity—had already embedded Signal onto government-issued devices, following standing CISA and agency guidance. When Secretary Pete Hegseth or CIA Director John Ratcliffe received a government phone with Signal pre-installed, they were not circumventing norms. They were inheriting them.

Indeed, when Ratcliffe testified before Congress that Signal had been approved and operational prior to his swearing-in, he was telling a simple truth. The app’s presence was not the result of some rogue IT technician. It was institutional.

Nor did this usage violate classification protocols. The so-called “Houthi group”—a shorthand for officials coordinating a response to Houthi threats—did not trade secrets over Signal. They, like their Biden-era predecessors, used the app as a signaling mechanism. When sensitive details were shared, they did so through the secure, internal communications infrastructure known colloquially as the “high side.” Signal was the knock on the door, not the delivery of state secrets.

What, then, explains the current outcry? Partly, it is the irresistible appeal of scandal. Partly, it is the inertia of a media ecosystem more eager to assign blame than trace causality. But mostly, it is the result of historical amnesia—or, less charitably, selective memory.

Signal did not materialize in the White House like contraband. Its legitimacy was conferred through a series of executive decisions, policy advisories, and security assessments issued by the Biden administration and its agencies. These were not the actions of rebels, but of risk managers. When China is intercepting mobile calls and Russia is probing federal communications infrastructure, encrypted apps like Signal become not indulgences, but necessities.

And yet, Biden officials now seek to distance themselves from this legacy. They claim, post hoc, that Signal was never meant for anything other than informal nudges. Perhaps so. But they ignore the fact that these nudges were systematized, institutionalized, and blessed by federal cybersecurity authorities under their watch.

To object now, in the face of continuity, is to rewrite the record. The Trump team did not normalize Signal. They inherited its normalization. The Biden administration issued the guidance, endorsed the installations, and navigated the legal architecture that made its use permissible—if limited—within the executive branch. The proof is as ironic as it is revealing: on March 26, 2025, American Oversight—a Democratic-aligned watchdog organization—filed suit against Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and acting Archivist Marco Rubio for using Signal to discuss US military strikes on Houthi rebels. Yet the lawsuit makes no mention of the fact that the Biden administration had already authorized and institutionalized Signal’s use, even issuing explicit guidance through CISA in December 2024 recommending the app for high-threat communication scenarios. The very NGO now crying foul knew that Signal had been embraced by the prior administration—an embrace they declined to challenge when it came from their own political allies.

We may debate whether encrypted, ephemeral messaging tools have a place in government. We may lament the tension between secrecy and transparency. But let us not confuse cause with consequence. Signal was not a Trump innovation. It was a Biden inheritance.

The irony, then, is not that the Trump administration used Signal. The irony is that those now criticizing them laid the very foundation for its use.

And that, like so many truths in Washington, is encrypted only if we choose not to see it.

Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.