The federal government is preparing to execute condemned prisoners by firing squad, electric chair or nitrogen gas if lethal injection drugs cannot be obtained, under a sweeping plan unveiled by the Justice Department to restart the machinery of capital punishment.
The recommendation, delivered Friday, April 25, 2026, in a report titled “Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty,” fulfills a promise President Trump made on his first day back in office to revive a punishment that had largely gone dormant under his predecessor. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche directed the Bureau of Prisons to expand its execution protocol to include older methods like firing squads and electrocution, alongside the gas asphyxiation method pioneered by Alabama in 2024.
“This modification will help ensure the Department is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable,” the report stated, according to reporting by NBC News.
A Reversal Years in the Making
The plan represents a stark reversal from the policies of former President Joe Biden, whose Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed an indefinite moratorium on federal executions. That moratorium rested on an analysis concluding that lethal injection using pentobarbital, the powerful barbiturate adopted by the federal government in 2019, could not be administered without risking “unnecessary pain and suffering.”
Trump’s first term, which ended in 2021, broke a 17-year drought in federal executions. In the closing months of that term, the government put 13 federal prisoners to death by lethal injection — an unprecedented pace in modern American history. His Day One executive order this term directed the Justice Department to prioritize seeking and implementing death sentences, and Blanche has since authorized capital prosecutions against nine defendants, including three MS-13 members — two of them illegal aliens — accused of murdering a federal witness.
“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” Blanche said in a statement released by the department.
Why the Drug Supply Ran Dry
The pivot to alternative methods is driven less by ideology than by chemistry. Pharmaceutical companies — many of them European — refuse to sell their products to American prison systems for use in executions, partly to comply with a European Union ban. Faced with empty supply lines, U.S. prisons have turned to smaller, less-regulated compounding pharmacies willing to produce copies of execution drugs.
Several states have confronted the same shortage and revived older methods in recent years. South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad in March 2025, and at least one more inmate followed him to the same chair weeks later. Idaho moved to authorize the same method. Lethal injection remains the most common execution method in the United States, but it has a higher rate of being botched than most alternatives. Some executions have been aborted as prison officials struggled to find a vein on a strapped-down prisoner. Opponents point to autopsies showing that executed people’s lungs bore the hallmarks of drowning before the pentobarbital killed them, according to an NPR review of more than 200 post-execution autopsies.
Three Men Remain on Federal Death Row
Biden’s clemency push left federal death row nearly empty. He commuted the sentences of 37 of 40 condemned inmates, a move that Garland urged based on the attorney general’s personal opposition to capital punishment, the Justice Department said, and that the department now contends was made without consulting all victims’ families.
Three men were not spared: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in 2015 for the Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, convicted in 2016 of murdering nine worshipers at a South Carolina church and sentenced to death in 2017; and Robert Bowers, convicted in 2023 of killing 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. None has received an execution date. The path between sentencing and the death chamber typically stretches 15 years or longer as prisoners exhaust legal appeals.
Legal Battles Loom
Whenever a state or the federal government adopts a new execution protocol, death row prisoners can mount constitutional challenges arguing the method qualifies as “cruel and unusual punishment.” Those challenges have a long losing streak — the Supreme Court has never found an adopted execution method to be unconstitutional. Still, lawyers for the condemned are expected to test every new procedure the Bureau of Prisons writes into its manual.
For Trump and Blanche, the report is the opening move in a broader effort to push capital cases through the system more quickly. The administration has framed it as a duty owed to victims and a deterrent to the worst crimes. For critics, it is the resurrection of methods many Americans had assumed were relics — firing squads and electric chairs returning, by federal sanction, to the 21st century.