Senior Bureau of Industry and Security officials haven’t yet been given orders by the Trump administration on several key export control policy issues, including possible plans to soon relax export controls against Russia, multiple Commerce Department officials said last week.
The Commerce Department’s long-awaited proposed rule on routed exports is essentially ready to be published, but it’s unclear how long it may take the new Trump administration to give the agency the green light, officials said last week.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is working on multiple export control-related investigations that could soon lead to public penalties and criminal indictments, Commerce Department officials said last week. They also said BIS is doubling down on Iran-related enforcement as part of the Trump administration's renewed maximum pressure campaign against the country.
Jeffrey Kessler, the undersecretary of the Bureau of Industry and Security, has been sworn in to his new position, the Commerce Department announced March 20. Kessler was confirmed by the Senate March 13 (see 2503130062 and 2503060043).
It’s still unclear how the Trump administration will approach the Bureau of Industry and Security's artificial intelligence diffusion rule or any of the agency’s recently published proposed or interim final rules that haven’t yet taken effect, a Commerce Department official said.
The Bureau of Industry and Security has begun to experience a significant decline in export license applications for Australia and the U.K. as a result of a rule it issued last year to reduce defense-related licensing requirements for those countries, a Commerce Department official said March 19.
A new automated tool that allows the Bureau of Industry and Security to screen license applications against certain U.S. government intelligence information could lead to an uptick in license denials, a Commerce Department official said.
The EU plans to update its export controls to make them more effective amid rapid geopolitical and technological change, a government official said March 19.
The Bureau of Industry and Security plans later this month to add 30 companies and remove 17 others from its boycott requester list, a list of entities that have asked other companies to boycott goods from certain countries in violation of the Export Administration Regulations (see 2412300003). The change will bring the total number of companies on the list to 165, a Commerce Department official said at the BIS annual update conference this week. The official said the list has “driven foreign parties to change their behavior by” convincing them to eliminate boycott language from their business documents.
The Bureau of Industry and Security this week updated its website with a new page that lists all past BIS-related rules and notices published in the Federal Register; new tools to search the Commerce Control List; and more, a Commerce Department official said at the agency’s annual update conference. The official said the updates are the “first phase of our ongoing enhancement and migration efforts to transition information from the” old BIS website to the new one (see 2312040016).