Tech Industry Asked Biden to Stop '11th Hour' Export Control Rules
The Biden administration’s last-minute publication of complex, consequential national security-related rulemakings appear to “bypass standard rulemaking processes” and are creating challenges for American technology companies, six trade groups representing major U.S. tech firms wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden earlier this week.
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These “hastily issued regulations call for immediate compliance and implementation without regard for how U.S. national security, global leadership and competitiveness may actually be diminished through faulty assumptions and incomplete data,” said the letter, which was sent to Biden just after the Bureau of Industry and Security published a new rule to place worldwide export controls on advanced computing chips and certain closed artificial intelligence model weights (see 2501130026). BIS published two more export control-related rules soon after, including one that updated existing semiconductor-related export controls released by BIS last year (see 2501150040).
The groups asked Biden to stop publishing new controls during his final week in office, saying they are “bypassing substantive consultations with subject matter experts in industry and academia.” This “represents an unprecedented abandonment of time-honored regulatory norms and export control best practices,” they said. “Compounding these concerns is the drive to issue such measures at ‘the 11th hour’ of your term, leaving any complications, problems, or outright mistakes to be addressed by the next Administration, which has had no hand in developing them.”
The letter was signed by the Information Technology Industry Council, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Foreign Trade Council, Semi, the Semiconductor Industry Association and the Semiconductor Technology Leadership Council.
A senior administration official, speaking to reporters earlier this week, said the administration felt it couldn’t wait to issue the rules because they were time-sensitive as the U.S. looks to maintain its technological lead over China in advanced semiconductors.