A court victory for former US President Donald Trump has reignited a campaign to strike down the data transfer agreement that underpins an estimated €1.7 trillion in data flows between the European Union and the United States, Politico reports.

The fight targets the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, the transatlantic arrangement that permits European personal data to flow lawfully to American companies. Privacy campaigners who previously succeeded in demolishing two earlier versions of the deal — through the Schrems I and Schrems II judgments — now aim to bring down its successor.

Why Trump's win matters

The court decision in Trump's favour has energised the deal's opponents because it bears directly on the question at the heart of the legal challenge: whether the American system of government, and its protections against arbitrary state action, can satisfy European standards of fundamental rights protection.

The Data Privacy Framework's survival depends on a European Commission adequacy decision — a formal finding that the United States ensures a level of data protection essentially equivalent to that required under EU law, and in particular under the General Data Protection Regulation. That finding rests substantially on US commitments to constrain American intelligence agencies' access to European data, commitments embedded in an executive order signed by President Joe Biden.

Any judicial outcome that alters the balance of power within the US system, or that changes who controls the levers of surveillance oversight, therefore feeds directly into the litigation strategy of those seeking to invalidate the framework. Trump's win, according to the report, has handed campaigners fresh ammunition.

The stakes for practitioners

For law firms and in-house counsel on both sides of the Atlantic, the consequences are substantial. Thousands of companies — from cloud providers and social media platforms to ordinary exporters of payroll and HR data — rely on the framework as their primary legal basis for transferring personal data from the EU to the US. If the deal falls, as its two predecessors did, those organisations would need to fall back on alternative transfer mechanisms, most notably standard contractual clauses accompanied by transfer impact assessments. That fallback carries significant compliance cost and legal uncertainty, since the Court of Justice of the European Court of Justice has already held that such clauses are invalid where US surveillance practices expose European data subjects to disproportionate risk.

The challengers' immediate objective is to bring a fresh case before the Court of Justice of the European Court of Justice and secure a third ruling dismantling the transatlantic arrangement. They succeeded twice before: in 2015, when the Safe Harbor agreement fell, and in 2020, when the Privacy Shield met the same fate.

The European Commission, for its part, continues to defend the framework as robust. The coming legal contest will determine whether the €1.7 trillion data relationship survives a third round of litigation — or whether transatlantic data transfers once again face years of disruption while companies scramble to restructure their compliance arrangements.