Former BIS Official Views Agency as Exception to Trump’s Federal Worker Cuts
President Donald Trump’s efforts to slash the federal workforce are unlikely to target the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is already dealing with employee shortages as it carries out U.S. export control policy, a former senior BIS official said.
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“BIS is understaffed,” said Rich Ashooh, the former assistant secretary of export administration during the Trump administration and now a government affairs and trade executive with Lam Research. “So whatever exceptions get applied to the staffing, I'm confident one will apply to BIS, because it's just too important.”
Trump has vowed to cut federal spending through fewer government workers, and the White House reportedly plans to offer buyouts to all federal employees who leave by Feb. 6. Ashooh, speaking during a virtual conference hosted last week by the Massachusetts Export Center, said BIS should remain untouched, adding that the agency needs more licensing officers and enforcement agents, points echoed by senior officials during the Biden administration. He also said the agency needs more skilled technology experts that help inform complex BIS rulemakings over advanced technologies.
“BIS is home to scientists, engineers and technicians who are paid to understand the technology they're regulating,” Ashooh said. “They need more of them.”
Without them, Ashooh said, export control rules will lack the needed input from technology experts who can help rein-in restrictions from being too broad or too challenging of a compliance hurdle. He noted that he’s already seeing a “trend” by BIS of publishing new rules in final form as opposed to proposed form, which he called “alarming” because they don’t seem to take into account sufficient input from technology experts working in industry.
The Biden administration issued multiple export control rules during its final week in office that several technology trade groups said appeared to bypass standard rulemaking procedures (see 2501160061).
“One of the challenges of all this rulemaking that's been going on that's been a little bit outside the norm -- it’s very, very hard to understand your compliance obligations,” Ashooh said. “In either case, whether or not you've got a bunch of confusing rules regulating highly advanced technology segments, or you've done everything right and you've got these really clear, understandable rules, [BIS] still needs more people.”
Ashooh also pointed to other export control trends that he said he finds concerning, including an uptick in the use of the Entity List “as a means of export control policy.” He said the list was designed as a “break-glass scenario” to be used only in special circumstances, but is now becoming a unilateral control that the U.S. can use instead of working with allies.
The Entity List is “a bespoke end-use control. And I think we're getting a little too comfortable using it as a substitute for the technology-based, [Export Administration Regulations]-located policy controls that, again, have multilateral input,” he said. “There's obviously a need for unilateral action. The Entity List is an example of that. But it is not the ideal way to do business, and so the growth of the Entity List is something we should really be paying attention to.”
Ashooh also said he hasn’t agreed with what he said has been the U.S.’s recent “ad hoc approach to multilateral alignment,” in which the U.S. has held “individual negotiations” on export controls with certain advanced technology-producing nations. The U.S. and its allies have tried to coordinate export controls outside traditional control regimes, especially the multilateral Wassenaar Arrangement, which has struggled to advance certain export control proposals because Russia remains a member with veto power (see 2405300063).
Ashooh said he instead prefers “small batch multilateralism,” in which the U.S. and other nations would continue to operate within the structure of a multilateral regime, but there would be a “method for the countries that have a stake in a particular technology [to] resolve the export control issues” in their own small groups. That export control decision would then be “implemented in a way that involves all members of the regime,” Ashooh said.
“Sometimes you'll be stopped by Russia or some other unanticipated block. Then you need another offshoot to do it,” he said. “But what you can't substitute for that is a unilateral control that will only allow foreign competitors to achieve a supreme position.”
This won’t be “easy,” he said, but it has “shown to be far more effective than the kind of ad hoc approach that we've seen and that I truly hope does not take root.”
Asked whether he thinks the Trump administration will expand export controls over China to target a broader set of semiconductor technologies, including lower-level chips, Ashooh said “there's no question that the U.S. government is actively considering it.” Technology policy analysts have said Trump would be unwise to expand export controls to cover older-generation semiconductors but could pursue new restrictions over less advanced versions of the tools used to make certain chips (see 2411140037).
Ashooh, whose company is a major producer of chip manufacturing products, said the government should approach any new controls with “caution” because of how much revenue U.S. chip firms derive from sales to China.
“There is a large part of the market that comes from China, and to the extent you restrict that, you restrict companies’ abilities to invest in their [technological] lead,” he said.