As the second Trump administration appears to deprioritize enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a wave of states has taken up the mantle of shedding light on foreign influence. In 2025, five states have quietly enacted invasive state laws with FARA-like disclosure requirements designed to reveal the activities of foreign governments, political parties, companies, and individuals within their own borders. Dubbed “baby FARA” laws, these statutes require those engaged in certain activities on behalf of foreign partners or with their support to publicly disclose those relationships and details about their work. Because many of these laws may require disclosure even if the very same activity is exempt from FARA at the federal level, compliance teams should take heed of this emerging trend.
FARA and the Federal State of Play
Originally enacted in 1938 to bring transparency to Nazi propaganda ahead of World War II, FARA requires those who engage in certain political or quasi-political activities on behalf foreign governments, parties, businesses, nonprofits, individuals, or other entities to register with the U.S. Department of Justice and publicly disclose specific details about the work unless it falls within one of several statutory and regulatory exemptions. For much of its existence, FARA was an obscure law with little enforcement, but between 2016 and 2024, the DOJ significantly stepped up civil and criminal enforcement efforts. Responding to concerns about “malign foreign influence,” DOJ dramatically increased the number of audits and civil settlements, secured high-profile criminal prosecutions, adopted aggressive interpretations of the infamously vague statute, and opened a rulemaking to potentially address perceived loopholes and shortcomings.
That shift has come into question under the second Trump administration. On her first day in office in early 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was deprioritizing criminal enforcement of FARA, limiting its focus to cases more akin to traditional espionage. The announcement suggests a significant departure from recent years, though it was accompanied by few details and civil enforcement measures continue at a steady clip.
Regardless of the shifts in federal enforcement, the specter of “foreign interference” has remained a frequent subject of public scrutiny. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have invoked the law to call into question the international ties of numerous companies, organizations, and individuals. Attuned to this, states are increasingly exploring their own ways to compel disclosure of foreign support with their own FARA-like laws.
Enter the States: A New Front for Disclosure of Foreign Relationships
States are no longer ceding disclosure of foreign relationships to the federal government. Since the start of 2025, five states—Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Texas—have adopted baby FARA laws, and similar bills have been considered in legislatures across the country, including in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. In recent years these laws have been accompanied by others targeting foreign influence, including at least 20 state laws prohibiting foreign sources from directly or indirectly supporting ballot measure campaigns or other state elections.
As summarized below, the baby FARA laws vary in detail, but often lift language verbatim from FARA, seeking to create a parallel state disclosure regime. In short, they typically require a domestic individual, nonprofit, or company engaged in certain activities within the state to abide by various conditions if they are acting on behalf of, or with the support of, a government, political party, business, or individual from a hostile foreign nation. Restrictions include robust disclosure about the activities and the nature of foreign support. In certain cases, the states purport to bar groups from certain privileges altogether if they receive foreign support.
All baby FARA bills adopted thus far limit their scope to entities with ties to a narrow list of countries—in all cases, some combination of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and the Maduro regime of Venezuela. As a result, the number of entities covered under state FARA laws is likely to be smaller than the number covered by federal FARA, which applies to agents of foreign principals in any country.
At the same time, the state laws contain many fewer registration exceptions than the federal FARA statute. Notably, state laws typically do not include FARA’s carveouts for those advancing purely commercial interests or for those already registered under applicable lobbying laws. Such exemptions give many businesses, nonprofits, and individuals a reprieve from FARA obligations at the federal level, and their absence from the state laws will mean that those who are covered because of their relationships with covered countries may face disclosure of information that is not currently part of the public record. That distinction should put entities with ties to the listed countries on high alert if they engage in activities like lobbying, influencing ballot measures or candidate elections, public relations, or fundraising in these states.
All of the state FARA laws are brand new, and states are still working on regulations and guidance materials to further explain how the statutes will be implemented and enforced. There are also significant constitutional considerations at play, including whether such laws violate protections for free speech, due process, interstate commerce, or federal preemption of state law.
