Keeping Technology Away From China Won’t Come Cheap

For all their differences with President Joe Biden, Republican lawmakers have backed at least one of the administration’s key priorities: blocking China’s access to advanced US technologies. If Congress hopes to make such export restrictions work, it should give more support to the agency responsible for enforcing them.

The Commerce Department’s roughly 500-person Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is tasked with drawing up and enforcing rules that dictate what products made with US technology can be sold abroad, to whom, and for what purposes. It also issues licenses approving certain transactions. The agency’s mission took on greater importance and complexity last year, when the US imposed sweeping curbs on shipments of advanced semiconductor technology to China. The rules aim to slow China’s technological progress, not just its access to specific dual-use items.