A purported draft executive order to reorganize the State Department that served as the basis for a New York Times article is a "fake document,” an agency spokesperson said in an email April 21.
A federal government payment website, Pay.gov, will be offline March 29 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT for the release of a new version of the application, the State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls said. "This outage will affect users paying their Registration fees during this window," it said.
Technology companies and industry groups mostly supported a January State Department rule that will add items to the U.S. Munitions List and remove other items that no longer warrant control (see 2501160027), although they said new restrictions around autonomous underwater vehicles, radar-related technology and more could cause unintended consequences.
The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky declared a mistrial in a case against defense contractor Quadrant Magnetics for violating export controls after the government sent the company thousands of pages of documents relevant to the case immediately prior to and during the company's trial (United States v. Quadrant Magnetics, W.D. Ky. # 3:22-00088).
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching for the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
A State Department notice declaring that all agency efforts to control international trade now constitute a "foreign affairs function" of the U.S. under the Administrative Procedure Act will ultimately be subject to the discretion of the courts, trade lawyers told us.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching for the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
Robert Rasmussen, a technology policy coordinator within the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, resigned from his role after accepting the terms of the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, he announced March 8 on LinkedIn. Rasmussen also worked as an export compliance specialist in the Bureau of Industry and Security from 2016 to 2020 before joining DDTC in 2023. The White House offered the deferred resignation program to federal employees earlier this year, promising to pay them through September in exchange for their resignation.
The U.S. should take more steps to slash export barriers hindering defense trade with close allies, especially Australia, industry officials and a researcher said last week.
Ola Craft, who left the government earlier this year as director of strategic trade and nonproliferation with the National Security Council, has joined Lowenstein Sandler as a senior trade adviser in its global trade and national security practice, the firm announced. Craft held senior export control roles in the Bureau of Industry and Security and the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls before joining the NSC in 2024.