Trump revives 'Project Texas' for Tik Tok

Oracle security plan mirrors a previously rejected effort, raising questions on viability.

- BY ALEXANDRA S. LEVINE

ORACLE would manage TikTok's U.S. data under the plan, a role at the center of debates over security.

(DAVID PAUL MORRIS Bloomberg)

President Trump's plan to save TikTok for Americans casts Oracle Corp. as the security guard for U.S. user data and the app's all-important algorithm.

"Oracle is playing a very big part. Oracle really understands this," Trump said from the Oval Office this week. "So I think it's going to be very well protected." White House trade advisor Peter Navarro said Friday that Oracle would function as "the great firewall of America."

But TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance Ltd., and Oracle have spent several years and billions of dollars working together to safeguard TikTok U.S. data as part of a partnership known as "Project Texas"—an arrangement that looks strikingly similar to the one laid out by Trump this week.

Those similarities are raising concerns among security experts and China hawks who fear Trump's newly announced plan doesn't go far enough to protect the privacy of Americans. The Biden administration rejected "Project Texas" as insufficient at addressing U.S. national security concerns, and now critics are arguing that the new TikTok-Oracle solution is more of the same.

"This is Project Texas 2.0, with some additional bells and whistles to try to argue that it complies with the law that Congress passed," said Jim Secreto, a former Treasury Department and national security official who helped shape the Biden administration's approach to TikTok. He called the deal "a cosmetic fix that trades long-term security for short-term optics."