On Friday, April 24, 2026, the Department of Justice released a report — authored under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — formally directing the Bureau of Prisons to expand federal execution methods beyond lethal injection. The new approved methods: firing squads, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation (pioneered by Alabama in 2024).
The stated rationale: difficulty sourcing drugs for lethal injection. “This modification will help ensure the Department is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable,” the report said.
Blanche's instruction to the Bureau of Prisons was to modify its execution protocol “to include additional, constitutional manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states.” He has also authorized seeking death sentences against nine people, following Trump's rescission of the Biden administration's moratorium on federal executions.
The context is extreme. In his first term, Trump resumed federal executions after a 20-year gap, putting 13 federal prisoners to death in his final few months in office — more than any president in over a century. Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row when he left office, leaving only three men. Blanche's move sets the stage for a potential return to a large-scale federal death-penalty program, now using methods the medical profession and most democracies have classified as torture or incompatible with human dignity.
Firing squads: currently legal in only five states (Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah). Electrocution: currently an option in some southern states as a secondary method. Gas asphyxiation: South Carolina used it once; Alabama became the first to use nitrogen hypoxia as a primary method in 2024. No method has been routinely used federally since 1937 (electrocution) or earlier (firing squad). The European Union, the United Kingdom, and most international human-rights bodies have long opposed all of these methods. The United States will now be the only G7 country with firing squads in its execution protocol.
Blanche: “Under President Trump's leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.” No victims' rights group has publicly called for firing squads.