H.R. 1772: Designation of English as the Official Language of the United States Act of 2025

A March 1, 2025 executive order already designates English as the official language of the United States. A future president could revoke that order with a signature. H.R. 1772 would put the designation in the U.S. Code, where only Congress can take it out.

The bill's widest reach is into the workplace: any English-language requirement or workplace policy, public or private, would be presumed consistent with federal law. Today, EEOC guidance treats an English-only rule applied at all times as presumptively discriminatory. A presumption is not a blanket approval — a worker could still challenge a policy — but the starting point in that dispute would move toward the employer.

For people seeking citizenship, Homeland Security would have 180 days to propose a uniform English test, open to public comment. The standard the bill sets is reading and generally understanding the country's founding documents and its federal laws. Exceptions to that standard, the bill says, should be limited to extraordinary circumstances, such as asylum.

That is a different bar from today's test, where an applicant reads aloud one of up to three sentences and writes one of up to three. Current rules also waive the English requirement for some longtime residents: people 50 or older with 20 years as a permanent resident, or 55 or older with 15. The bill doesn't repeal those waivers directly — it sets the principles the new rule would be written under.

One more change is easy to miss. When the English wording of a federal law is ambiguous, courts would resolve it in line with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments: not to deny rights retained by the people, and to reserve powers to the states or the people.

The bill's findings describe English as the common thread that has bound Americans of different backgrounds and affirm that states can set their own official language. The official-language and interpretation changes take effect 180 days after enactment.