The federal government last used a firing squad in 1953. Stalin was still in power, the Korean War had just ended, and Dwight Eisenhower was settling into the White House.
On Friday, the Trump administration decided it was time to revisit the era.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released a report directing the Bureau of Prisons to expand execution methods to include firing squads, electrocution, and nitrogen gas, alongside lethal injection.
The department described it as “streamlining internal processes to expedite death penalty cases.”
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“Streamlining” usually means less paperwork. Here, it means fewer delays before executions.
Blanche framed the shift as overdue justice.
“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment,” he said, citing terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is once again enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
The report included Blanche’s headshot on page three.
There are currently three people on federal death row whose sentences were not commuted: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylann Roof, and Robert Bowers. Blanche has already authorized seeking the death penalty against nine more individuals since Trump reversed Biden’s moratorium.
The system is scaling up.
The Department of Justice also instructed the Bureau of Prisons to explore relocating or expanding death row facilities, or building a new execution site designed for multiple methods.
The policy case remains thin.
Five states currently allow death by firing squad for those convicted of capital offenses who have exhausted the appeal process. The Death Penalty Information Center has documented that states using the death penalty are not statistically safer than those that do not, a finding that challenges the deterrence argument the administration cited repeatedly in Friday’s report.
Support for capital punishment has declined consistently across polling for three decades.
The last state firing squad execution in the US was Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina in 2025. An autopsy revealed that none of the three bullets fired directly hit his heart, which is where the gunmen were supposed to aim. His attorneys said he endured up to a minute of conscious pain before dying.
That case is now cited as a working model.
Trump oversaw 13 federal executions in the closing months of his first term, the highest total in more than 120 years. Friday’s directive suggests the next phase will push beyond that, with expanded methods and a report calling it a strengthening exercise.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
