The Bureau of Industry and Security should harmonize the Entity List with other lists across various agencies to better capture foreign companies that should be subject to strict trade restrictions, lawmakers told BIS Undersecretary Alan Estevez this week. Others said BIS has failed to blacklist Chinese military companies that deserve placement on the Entity List, allowing the Chinese government to continue to buy sensitive American technologies.

The Bureau of Industry and Security is conducting a review of the types of semiconductors and chipmaking equipment that can be exported to China to determine whether it needs to tighten those restrictions, BIS Undersecretary Alan Estevez said, speaking during a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week. He said the agency is considering tightening the “cut-off point” of semiconductors that are subject to strict export licensing requirements.

A potential provision in the bipartisan China package (see 2207120049) that would create an outbound investment screening mechanism received more opposition (see 2206280051 and 2201140038) this week, including from lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee and former U.S. investment screening officials. While opponents of the provision say some form of outbound screening may eventually be necessary to further restrict sensitive technology transfers to China, they also said the current wording is too broad and leaves too many questions unanswered.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who is a key decisionmaker on what to bring to the House floor, rejected out of hand the Senate minority leader's proposal to bring the Senate China competition bill up for a vote, since negotiations between the House of Representatives and the Senate have stalled.

Republicans who are in the China package negotiations say that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's tweet that said that moving even a smaller Build Back Better bill would halt negotiations was not an empty threat. He had said that while Congress was away from Washington, at the beginning of the month (see 2207010039).

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U.S. officials are urging the Netherlands to ban ASML Holding from selling certain chipmaking technology to China, Bloomberg reported July 5. The U.S. is hoping the Netherlands expands an existing moratorium on the sale of the “most advanced systems” to China, the report said, and “ significantly” expand the type of chipmaking equipment subject to China-related export restrictions. American officials are specifically lobbying their Dutch counterparts to ban ASML from exporting its older deep ultraviolet lithography, or DUV systems, to China, the report said. U.S. officials discussed the issue with the Dutch government during Deputy Commerce Secretary Don Grave’s recent visit to the Netherlands.

The Bureau of Industry and Security is using recently received funding to expand its U.S. field offices and send more officers overseas, said Matthew Axelrod, the agency’s top enforcement official. Axelrod said BIS soon will launch a field office in Phoenix and has sent export control officers to the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki and the American Institute of Taiwan in Taipei. BIS also recently sent its first intelligence analyst abroad to work with the Canadian Border Services Agency.

Global supply chain issues could be alleviated with better data sharing and processing, experts said during a June 29 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Supply Chain Competitiveness. But to overcome trust issues among companies reluctant to share data, some government intervention may be necessary, they said.

Although the U.S. and allies are discussing creating a new multilateral export control framework, it’s too soon to tell whether those talks will result in a formal regime, said Alan Estevez, undersecretary of the Bureau of Industry and Security. He said the group of countries has “momentum” toward a new framework, but they haven’t yet agreed to establish a formal organization to replace some of the existing multilateral regimes, such as the Wassenaar Arrangement.