The Bureau of Industry and Security for the past month has been led by a key Project 2025 contributor entrusted by the Trump administration with overseeing an export control policy review, an effort that resulted in a licensing pause and coincided with multiple senior career employees leaving the agency. BIS resumed processing and approving certain license applications around the same time the Trump official was removed from his position late last month, Export Compliance Daily has found.
Microsoft this week urged the Trump administration to rethink portions of a Biden-era rule that placed global export controls on certain shipments of advanced artificial intelligence chips, saying the rule will have unintended negative consequences on the American technology industry.
President Donald Trump on Feb. 26 said he is reversing certain sanctions relief provided to Venezuela by the Biden administration as part of an “oil transaction agreement” signed in November 2022. That date was when the Office of Foreign Assets Control granted U.S. oil company Chevron a general license to resume certain oil activities in Venezuela, which was intended to support the newly restarted negotiations between Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s regime and the country’s opposition party (see 2211280042).
The U.K. has seen a steady uptick in the number of new criminal investigations on sanctions and export control violations over the last three years, with most having a Russia connection, the country’s trade enforcement agency said. The agency during that time has worked to strengthen its “capabilities for detecting and responding to sanctions breaches,” including by hiring 40 more criminal investigators and devoting more funding toward gathering “intelligence” on industry’s sanctions compliance efforts.
Matt Borman, a longtime senior career official overseeing export control regulations at the Bureau of Industry and Security, is expected to leave BIS soon, according to two people familiar with the matter.
A new White House memo on President Donald Trump’s “America-first investment policy” previews efforts to expand both inbound and outbound foreign investment restrictions, tamp down on the use of mitigation agreements, fast-track investment deals from certain allies and more.
The Bureau of Industry and Security’s ongoing export control policy review is likely to result in an initial set of recommendations involving advanced technology exported to China, Akin Gump said last week.
Any potential U.S.-Russia agreement to end the war in Ukraine will likely take at least a year to come to fruition, researchers and policy experts said, although some U.S. sanctions could be lifted in the meantime.
The EU will consider upcoming U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum as it enters the final stages of a review of its steel safeguard measures (see 2412180032), with the aim of protecting European firms from import surges caused by the coming tariffs, said Leopoldo Rubinacci, the European Commission’s deputy director-general for trade.
The U.S. has so far declined to tell the EU how it chose the 18 countries that will benefit from mostly unrestricted access to advanced artificial intelligence chips under the Bureau of Industry and Security’s AI diffusion rule, the European Commission’s chief trade enforcement officer said this week, making it “very difficult” for EU officials to negotiate lifting the restrictions.