Foreign Aid Freeze Will Harm Efforts to Keep US Technology From Adversaries, Senator Says
The Trump administration’s foreign aid freeze will hamstring efforts by international organizations such as Conflict Armament Research (CAR) to detect sales of American technology to foreign "adversaries," including Iran, North Korea and Russia, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said Feb. 4.
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Blumenthal said the freeze has halted payments on three State Department grants that account for almost half of CAR's annual budget. He said CAR’s work alone has provided information that led to more than 100 entities of concern, mainly located in China, being sanctioned or listed by the Treasury and Commerce departments.
“I am deeply concerned that pausing these and similar grants will embolden our adversaries and lead to more U.S. technology ending up in enemy hands,” Blumenthal wrote in a Feb. 3 letter urging Secretary of State Marco Rubio to end the funding freeze.
Blumenthal is ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has investigated the flow of American-made computing chips into Russian weapons and Chinese artificial intelligence systems (see 2409100069 and 2412190033).