BIS Export Control Resources Have Been 'Neglected,' Former DOD Official Says

The U.S. needs to pour more funding and resources into the Bureau of Industry and Security to allow it to better address China-related national security risks, said Gregory Allen, a technology policy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Defense Department official. Although BIS is charged with implementing some of the U.S.’s most sensitive trade restrictions, its export control functions have “had a flat budget for the better part of a decade,” Allen said during a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing last week. “It has been profoundly neglected” and subject to an “appalling mismanagement of resources.”

Allen said “very few people are asking” about whether BIS needs more resources to more effectively impose its export controls. “This is a profound mistake,” he said. “The U.S. conversation around export controls is so focused on ‘should we export control this, should we export control that,’ and failing to ask the types of questions that we ask in other aspects of our national security policy.”

The U.S. should be asking: “Do the people charged with doing this job have the tools they need? Are we making this the type of priority that it is?” Allen said. “I believe that we're making some progress in this area, but it's only a fraction of what is needed.”