By Tytan Montgomery*
Policy Intern – Summer 2026
The Trump administration entered its second term with strong rhetorical commitments to the promotion of international religious freedom (IRF). President Trump established a Religious Liberty Commission charged with defending the right to practice one’s faith in the US and globally, and, in particular, has issued a Global Coptic Day statement in both 2025 and 2026.[1] This year’s statement attempted to acknowledge Coptic struggles, recalling the 21 Copts killed by ISIS in Libya in 2015. While this statement certainly presents a positive step, it does not acknowledge the discrimination Copts face in Egypt today.
On a broader level, it seems like numerous IRF experts are not convinced that the administration is doing enough to substantively promote religious freedom across the world. In May 2026, religious freedom advocates writing in the Washington Times urged the administration to build on its first-term record, citing a new State Department visa restriction policy targeting religious freedom violators.[2]
Additionally, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) 2026 Annual Report repeatedly challenges many of the administration’s rhetorical promises with the practical policy decisions it has taken since assuming power in 2025. The USCIRF report, which documents conditions across 29 countries and makes policy recommendations to the President, the State Department, and Congress,[3] is the first comprehensive account of where this administration’s IRF record actually stands. The report is clear that rhetorical promises have not translated into actual policy changes, and Egypt is one of the clearest illustrations of that gap. Egypt is also a case where that gap matters most, especially given the size of the U.S.-Egypt aid relationship.
A Flawed Global Record
On the positive side, the administration took some selective steps under the goal of promoting IRF. For instance, President Trump redesignated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) in October 2025, citing extremist violence against Christians in the country’s Middle Belt region and the government’s failure to prosecute perpetrators, which was explicitly welcomed by the USCIRF’s 2026 report. But the sustainable infrastructure needed to act on these recommendations and promote IRF effectively is strained. For instance, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom position has gone unfilled for the entire term so far. The nominee, Mark Walker, a former congressman, was never confirmed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Committee’s Chairman, Jim Risch (R-ID), noted that scheduling a confirmation hearing for Walker depends on “the priority given by the White House,” implying that Walker’s confirmation was never one.[4] To this date, the administration has not nominated anyone to take over that post since Mr. Walker’s withdrawal from consideration in early January.
The IRF Ambassador-at-Large is the U.S. government’s essential diplomatic voice on religious freedom, responsible for engaging foreign governments, leading multilateral initiatives, and ensuring that IRF is integrated into U.S. foreign policy, as required by the 1998 IRF Act.[5] A vacant position appears to be a sign of deprioritization, regardless of what any official statement may say, and this is just one example of a lack of commitment to IRF in this administration’s foreign policy. The State Department has failed to publish its own IRF Annual Reports covering 2024 and 2025, with its last report, covering 2023, was published in June 2024. Some observers note that the unprecedented reduction of staff in the Department of State may be one of the reasons behind this major failure.
Egypt: The Visible Gap
Egypt receives approximately 1.3 billion USD in U.S. military and economic assistance annually, which is a figure that has remained largely constant since the Camp David Accords of 1979.[6] That aid relationship has continued through every administration, Republican and Democrat alike, despite well-documented human rights violations against Coptic and other religious minorities. That continuity is a structural feature of U.S.-Egypt relations that no administration has been willing to challenge in any sustained way. Roughly one billion of that total is disbursed with no conditions attached, with the remaining three hundred million nominally tied to human rights benchmarks. However, Congress has invoked a National Security Waiver to release it in full nearly every year regardless of Egypt’s record.[7]
The mechanism that should prevent this is Section 502(b) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits security assistance to governments that engage in consistent patterns of gross human rights violations.[8] The provision has been in place since 1974, yet it has never once been invoked against Egypt. In practice, as a Georgetown legal analysis of the statute documents, the executive branch’s resistance to 502(b) began almost immediately after its passage. Administrations of both parties have invoked national security waivers (consistently, in Egypt’s case), exploited definitional ambiguities, or simply declined to make the formal findings the statute requires.[9] The result is that Egypt continues to receive military aid that U.S. law would restrict or eliminate if applied straightforwardly.[10]
The 2026 USCIRF report documents that this sustained aid relationship ignores the increasingly unaddressed patterns of anti-Coptic hostilities and other human rights abuses in Egypt. Church construction remains starkly constrained: only 160 permits were approved under Egypt’s 2016 Church Construction Law in 2025, while the Egyptian government has invested 18.6 billion EGP in the construction and renovation of over 12,000 mosques.[11] Coptic women continue to disappear, with authorities regularly failing to investigate or cooperate with families seeking answers. St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, faces full seizure and confiscation by the State, thus nullifying its historical status quo, as well as a threat to transform its surroundings into a profitable tourist site.[12]
One of the main reasons this aid relationship has persisted throughout administrations is due to sustained Egyptian lobbying efforts aimed at U.S. policymakers. Coptic Solidarity’s June 2025 report, “Cairo’s Covert Power in Washington,” documents that between late 2013 and May 2025, the Egyptian government had hired 13 lobbying firms that conducted over 5,500 political activities targeting U.S. policymakers to promote Cairo’s priorities. One of this operation’s objectives, documented through Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, is to promote a narrative that the El-Sisi regime has effectively spread religious tolerance across Egyptian society and institutions, contrary to what USCIRF and independent monitors report.[13] Nevertheless, many policymakers, particularly on the Republican side, have embraced these lobbyists’ arguments.
As CS argued in a February 2026 analysis responding to USCIRF’s own call for a lobbying ban on CPC-designated countries, Egypt, a USCIRF Special Watch List (SWL)-designated state, performs exactly the function USCIRF denounces, marketing Egypt as a defender of religious freedom. CS accordingly called for Congress to extend such a ban to SWL-designated governments as well.[14]
The Partisan Trap
The discussions of U.S. policy toward Egypt tend to fall back into partisan positions. Most Republican voices frame the current Egyptian regime as an indispensable strategic partner whose aid relationship should not be made contingent on its compliance with human rights. Democrat voices tend to acknowledge the strategic partnership while calling for greater accountability, though that accountability rarely materializes in concrete policy when Democrats hold power either. Still, for instance, the pattern of 502(b) waivers spans administrations of both parties.[15]
The conviction and sentencing of former Senator Robert Menendez, who was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, for acting as a foreign agent for the Egyptian government while accepting bribes, renewed scrutiny of how Egypt’s lobbying operation affects American political life.[16] Egypt’s lobbying activities in Washington, DC, involve efforts to distort U.S. policymakers’ understanding of religious freedom conditions in the country. The Friends of Egypt Caucus in Congress represents another mechanism that Egypt uses to maintain soft influence regardless of which party is in power.[17] The bipartisan caucus, co-chaired by a Republican and a Democrat, meets regularly with El-Sisi and has praised his government’s record on religious tolerance, despite what USCIRF and independent reports suggest about El-Sisi’s administration’s deplorable human rights record.
What the Evidence Shows
The USCIRF 2026 Annual Report and Coptic Solidarity’s own research support a few clear conclusions. While the Trump administration’s second term has promoted IRF rhetorically and followed through on designations like Nigeria’s, the same follow-through has not materialized for other worthy cases, including Egypt. While Nigeria fits the administration’s preferred frame of acute and violent religious persecution, Egypt’s discrimination is instead structural and inherently administrative. Hence, the institutional infrastructure required to treat IRF violations holistically and apolitically has been actively undermined by inaction and selective action. As a prime example, Egypt continues to receive substantial assistance under conditions that U.S. law has never meaningfully enforced. Egypt’s lobbying activities help explain why, shaping the information environment in which policymakers act, including through a Global Coptic Day statement that said nothing about Copts’ current struggles.
Some of these performance indicators, particularly the aid relationship, are bipartisan. But the ambassador vacancy, the unreleased annual report, and the public warmth from President Trump towards El-Sisi are quite troubling. Without comparing the various administrations, this second Trump administration appears to apply vague rhetoric that is consistently outpaced by the current U.S. administration’s realpolitik.
* Tytan Montgomery is Coptic Solidarity’s Policy Intern and a Political Science third-year student at Brigham Young University, studying International Strategy and Diplomacy with a minor in Linguistics. His research focuses on comparative politics, autocratization, and democratic backsliding, and he has research experience applying quantitative methods in R. Tytan cares about understanding how political institutions erode and what conditions make that more or less likely.
[1] The White House, “Presidential Message on Global Coptic Day, 2025,” June 2, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/06/presidential-message-on-global-coptic-day-2025
[2] David Trimble and Thomas Farr, “Will Trump Lead Again in Global Religious Freedom?,” Washington Times, May 19, 2026 (op-ed by Religious Freedom Institute leaders, not an administration statement). On the visa policy, see Congressional Research Service, “Global Human Rights: International Religious Freedom Policy,” IF10803.
[3] U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), 2026 Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: USCIRF, March 2026), https://www.uscirf.gov/annual-reports.
[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/trumps-religious-freedom-nominee-held-former-political-foe-allies-say-rcna248871
[5] International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, Pub. L. No. 105-292,its, 112 Stat. 2787.
[6] Congressional Research Service, “Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations.” U.S. military assistance to Egypt has averaged approximately $1.3 billion annually since the Camp Davidwell-documented Accords. See also Coptic Solidarity, “Cairo’s Covert Power in Washington,” June 2025, https://www.copticsolidarity.org/2025/06/30/cairos-covert-power-in-washington-new-report-unveils-egypts-strategic-lobbying-machine-in-the-u-s-capital/.
[7] Human Rights Watch, “Egypt: US Waives Human Rights Conditions on Military Aid,” September 13, 2024, https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/13/egypt-us-waives-human-rights-conditions-military-aid.
[8] Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, Pub. L. No. 87-195, § 502B, 75 Stat. 424.
[9] John Ramming Chappell, “The Rise and Fall of Section 502B,” Northwestern Journal of International Human Rights (2022), https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1250&context=njihr.
[10] “Scrutiny of U.S. Military Aid to Egypt Needed,” Foreign Policy, May 20, 2026, https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/20/egypt-military-aid-congress/.
[11] USCIRF, 2026 Annual Report, Egypt chapter.
[12]https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/middle-east/greek-orthodox-church-warns-of-threat-to-st-catherine-s-monastery-in-sinai-after-egypt-court-ruling
[13] Coptic Solidarity, “Cairo’s Covert Power in Washington: New Report Unveils Egypt’s Strategic Lobbying Machine in the U.S. Capital,” June 30, 2025, https://www.copticsolidarity.org/2025/06/30/cairos-covert-power-in-washington-new-report-unveils-egypts-strategic-lobbying-machine-in-the-u-s-capital/.
[14] Coptic Solidarity, “USCIRF Wants a Lobbying Ban on Religious Freedom Violators — Egypt Is Exhibit A,” February 23, 2026, https://www.copticsolidarity.org/2026/02/23/uscirf-wants-a-lobbying-ban-on-religious-freedom-violators-egypt-is-exhibit-a/its.
[15] For the broader legal and historical context of 502(b) waivers, see Chappell, “The Rise and Fall of Section 502B.” For a specific instance of the Obama administration invoking a waiver on Egypt, see Marisa Sullivan, “U.S. Foreign Aid and Morsi’s Ouster,” Middle East Institute, July 31, 2013, https://mei.edu/publication/us-foreign-aid-and-morsis-ouster/.
[16] Menendez was convicted July 16, 2024, and sentenced January 29, 2025; see U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, “Former U.S. Senator Robert Menendez Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison for Bribery, Foreign Agent, and Obstruction Offenses,” January 29, 2025, https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-us-senator-robert-menendez-sentenced-11-years-prison-bribery-foreign-agent-and. See also Coptic Solidarity, “Cairo’s Covert Power in Washington,” 2025, which cites the case as context for renewed scrutiny of Egypt’s FARA-registered lobbying activities.
[17] Coptic Solidarity, “Cairo’s Covert Power in Washington,” 2025. See also Coptic Solidarity, “USCIRF Wants a Lobbying Ban on Religious Freedom Violators,” 2026, for the argument that the Egyptian Friends Caucus and similar mechanisms extend Egypt’s Washington influence beyond registered lobbying.
