Lawmakers Aim to Revive Outbound Investment Deal in 2025
Although Congress last week shelved a compromise to restrict outbound investment in China, two key lawmakers said they believe the legislation or something similar could become law next year.
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Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, said he plans to introduce the outbound investment language as a stand-alone bill in January. The measure was included in a 1,547-page continuing resolution designed to keep the government funded through mid-March, but it was removed from the slimmed-down CR that ultimately passed (see 2412200069).
“It had sufficient support to be in that initial CR, so I’m going to reintroduce that verbatim,” Barr told reporters Dec. 20. “That doesn’t have to be the final version, but I think it’s a good starting place for the 119th [Congress]. There’s a lot of work that went into that.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who expects to become the committee's “chairman emeritus” in January, said the outbound investment legislation is “in a good place right now” because the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., played a key role in negotiating the compromise among congressional leaders.
“I think it’ll pass on its own,” McCaul told Export Compliance Daily. “My hope is we pass it early in the [new] year.”
The compromise, called the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (Coins) Act, would expand upon the Biden administration’s August 2023 executive order by covering more artificial intelligence models and by adding hypersonic and related aerospace technologies (see 2412180034). It would also authorize the president to impose sanctions on Chinese entities connected to China’s military and intelligence apparatus.
A significant unknown next year is whether President-elect Donald Trump would support the Coins Act. House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., alleged that Trump ally Elon Musk may have objected to the initial CR because he feared the outbound investment restrictions could have affected his companies' business in China.
"It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators and businesses," DeLauro wrote in a letter to congressional leaders. Musk's public criticism of the initial CR focused on other provisions.
Barr said he plans to discuss outbound investment with the incoming Trump administration. “I look forward to talking to the new administration about what their views are,” he said.
Another uncertainty is whether Reps. Brian Mast, R-Fla., and French Hill, R-Ark., the incoming chairmen, respectively, of the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Services committees (see 2412100008 and 2412120074), would support the Coins Act. Hill suggested on CBS's Face the Nation and CNBC's SquawkBox this week that congressional debate on the best way to restrict outbound investment isn't over.