The Trump administration wants to shorten the appeals process for people sentenced to death and add firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation as methods of federal execution, the Department of Justice announced in a report on Friday.
The report is the latest development in the Trump administration’s long campaign to execute as many people as possible. In the report, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche boasted of the execution spree President Donald Trump carried out during his first term. After a long de facto moratorium on federal executions, Trump oversaw 13 killings in his final six months before leaving office. In 2024, his successor, President Joe Biden, commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row during his final days in office, leaving Trump — who openly fantasized about carrying out another rash of executions — with a nearly empty federal death row.
One of Trump’s first acts upon reentering office in 2025 was to sign an executive order calling for the dramatic expansion of the use of the federal death penalty. The new report goes further, laying out specific and significant policy and legislative changes the DOJ believes should be made.
One of the main obstacles states and the federal government have encountered in carrying out executions is acquiring the drugs used in lethal injections, the most common method of killing death-sentenced prisoners in the U.S. Autopsies of those executed by lethal injection show signs of pulmonary edema, which can create the feeling of suffocating or drowning to death. In response to legal challenges and public pressure, many drug producers have stopped providing drugs for executions. In its report, the Justice Department proposed legislation to make it harder to identify who is providing the drugs. It also suggested authorizing federal agencies to produce a drug commonly used in executions called pentobarbital so the government wouldn’t have to rely on outside providers.
