BIS Needs Better Communication About Export Licenses With Other Agencies, GAO Says
The Bureau of Industry and Security could streamline and strengthen its export license review process by improving its information sharing with other agencies involved in the process, especially the Defense, Energy and State departments, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Giving the other agencies “easy access” to all license application information would help ensure their reviews are well-informed, the GAO said. That information is currently spread across multiple classified and unclassified systems, which often creates “challenges" in accessing important data. For example, a "limited number of staff" at DOD and DOE have access to a classified BIS site that contains risk assessments of foreign parties, and "requesting additional access takes time."
Officials at reviewing agencies “stated that they have at times recommended denial for an application to trigger an interagency dispute resolution process where additional information is made available to all the parties,” the GAO wrote. “However, using the dispute resolution process in this manner, rather than resolving issues between the licensing and reviewing officials, may result in unnecessary and inefficient use of resources and increased process time, according to agency officials.”
The GAO also recommends that BIS consult with its interagency partners before removing agreed-upon license conditions, even if it considers the conditions redundant or inconsistent with standard license provisions. The GAO believes that such consultations would help ensure that national security risks and other foreign policy concerns are addressed.
"For example, agencies tend to add conditions on sending certain technologies to China or countries that are manufacturing aerospace components for the People’s Republic of China," the report says. "According to multiple officials, removing conditions without consulting with the reviewing agencies increases national security risks."
The GAO also suggests that BIS develop a long-term workforce plan to determine its resource needs, including the size and composition of its staff. The bureau hasn’t undertaken such a planning effort since 2016, even though its workload has grown significantly in recent years due to such factors as the increased use of export controls for China and Russia and the transfer of responsibility for certain firearms from the State Department to the Commerce Department, the report says.
“BIS officials told us that ‘volatility in the fiscal environment’ and BIS’s recent focus on other sources of funding like supplemental funding for Ukraine discourages them from forecasting beyond annual budget requests,” the GAO wrote. “BIS officials said that BIS identifies its most critical mission needs for financial and personnel resources every year and requests these resources from Congress through its President’s Budget Requests. However, BIS did not provide documentation or analysis of how it arrived at the requested number of positions in its annual requests to Congress.”
BIS had 585 positions in FY 2024, up 45% or 182 positions from FY 2013, but most of that increase, 104, went to the new Office of Information and Communications Technology and Services, which is separate from BIS’s traditional export control mission. During that same period, in BIS’s two entities dealing with export controls, Export Administration increased by one position, to 218, while Export Enforcement grew by 76 positions to 247.
BIS has asked Congress for a $132 million budget increase in FY 2026, including to hire almost 200 export enforcement special agents to charge those who illegally share U.S. technology with adversaries, and 18 export control officers to monitor foreign compliance with U.S. export controls (see 2505020030 and 2506120073).
The GAO said the Commerce Department agreed with its recommendations. Commerce didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment. The office of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who requested the report, also had no immediate comment on the document, which the GAO released June 26.