The Trump administration will not seek the removal of Israeli tech firm NSO Group from a Commerce Department trade blacklist that has significantly dented the company’s financial fortunes, U.S. officials said this week.

Nor is the White House planning to rescind a Biden-era executive order that effectively bars the company from selling its controversial Pegasus spyware to the U.S. government, said the officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

The administration’s plans are a rebuff to NSO Group, which is in Washington this week on a rehabilitation tour, in hopes of being removed from the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which bars it from receiving U.S. technology. The list is sort of a scarlet letter in the business world because of the reputational harm it confers. Since the 2021 listing, NSO Group has faced significant financial hardship.

The statements to The Washington Post come amid speculation that the Trump administration might rescind or modify the executive order. President Donald Trump has revoked dozens of President Joe Biden’s orders and has others under review.

Company representatives visiting from Israel had hoped to meet with the White House on Monday. But when National Security Council aides found out Sunday evening that the group’s underlying goal was to be taken off the trade blacklist, they balked and canceled the meeting, according to officials.

“The company was not forthcoming in its motives for seeking the meeting,” said one U.S. official. “The White House has no plans to seek removal of NSO from the Entity List or to rescind the spyware executive order.”

A modification of the order might come later, but it will not be aimed at doing any favors for NSO Group, the official said.

An NSO Group spokesman had no comment.

The 2023 executive order barred federal agencies from using commercial spyware that has previously been used to penetrate the devices of U.S. personnel, or to abuse human rights by allowing governments to spy on dissidents. In announcing the order, Biden administration officials disclosed that at least 50 U.S. government employees in countries around the world had their cellphones infected with Pegasus.

Pegasus, known as “zero-click” malware, takes hold silently once it lands on the target’s phone, granting sweeping access to live calls, audio and video clips, location records, emails and even chats on encrypted apps.

The Monday meeting would have been the first with the White House since the company was placed on the Entity List for its “malicious” targeting of civil society. The meeting was requested by the group’s new lobbying firm, the Vogel Group, which also scheduled NSO visits with Republican lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill this week.

NSO executives intended to pitch the firm as useful to the Trump administration’s border security agenda — offering a way to track criminals and cartels in an age of encrypted apps, said one person familiar with the matter.

In 2022, the firm was in exploratory talks with U.S. defense contractor L3Harris to potentially acquire NSO’s technology. The Biden administration warned the deal would raise “serious” counterintelligence and security risks. The talks fell through and the following year Biden signed the spyware order.

The counterintelligence concerns arose from NSO Group’s close relationship with the Israeli government, which requires the Defense Ministry to sign off on all the firm’s contracts. That proximity could then give Israel a window into what U.S. agencies might be doing with NSO’s software, experts said. Israel, while a close partner of the United States, is not among the most trusted circle of Western intelligence allies — a group that includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and is known as the Five Eyes.

NSO Group has been hopeful that it will receive a more favorable reception from the new administration. Jonathan Fahey, a Homeland Security official during Trump’s first term, is registered to lobby on the account alongside Republican lobbyist Alex Vogel.

The Vogel Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Adding to NSO Group’s woes, this month a federal jury ordered the company to pay a record-setting $167 million for hacking more than 1,000 people through WhatsApp messages in a stunning cap to six years of litigation. The company lost $9 million in 2023 and $12 million in 2024, according to testimony from NSO chief executive Yaron Shohat, who said the company would struggle to pay significant damages.

NSO Group, a privately held company, licenses Pegasus to foreign governments — often with checkered human rights records — including Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Morocco. It also licenses the spyware to intelligence, law enforcement and military agencies, and says the tool is intended only for use against terrorists and other major criminals.

People familiar with the company previously told The Washington Post that NSO spyware helped Mexico twice capture drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in 2014 and in 2016, though The Post was not able to independently confirm the assertion.

In 2021, the Pegasus Project — an investigative consortium involving The Post — detailed a range of abuses, including the targeting of politicians, journalists and human rights workers. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab discovered in 2021 that the wife of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist, had Pegasus placed on her phone months before his death. Khashoggi was killed at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, the CIA concluded.

“NSO’s Pegasus is notorious for being a tool that dictators use to instill fear,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “It does not belong in democracies.”

To be taken off the Entity List, a company would have to convince the Commerce, State, Energy and Defense departments that the activities that resulted in their listing are no longer taking place and that the firm no longer poses a “significant risk” to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, according to federal regulations.

But NSO Group could be removed if there is a foreign policy impetus, said Matthew S. Borman, who handled export control policy at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security for more than 20 years. The Israeli government has pushed in the past to have NSO taken off the list, according to people familiar with the matter.

If the Trump administration wanted to accommodate the Israeli government, then “presumably all four agencies would sign off on that,” said Borman.