BIS Should Be Part of the Intelligence Community, US-China Commission Members Say

Commissioners Mike Kuiken and Randall Shriver, speaking during a recent event hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), both said BIS needs a bigger budget, more employees and more capabilities to help it craft and enforce export controls.

“This is basically a forgotten part of our government. Until maybe a year-and-a-half, two years ago, it wasn't that cool to talk about BIS,” said Shriver, who was speaking about recommendations for BIS that were outlined in the commission’s annual report released in November (see 2511180047). “And so shining a bright light on their capabilities and their requirements is something that we focused on.”

The report’s main recommendation said Congress should consider consolidating BIS and other trade and national security agencies into a single economic statecraft entity that would be a member of the U.S. intelligence community. But Shriver said the commission realizes that recommendation could “take time to build out and really establish.” Kuiken said BIS should be made a member of the U.S. intelligence community immediately.

BIS currently relies on intelligence input from other agencies when adjudicating export license applications or considering new export restrictions, which Kuiken said is inefficient. He said BIS should be “allowed to drive [intelligence] collection requirements in a very aggressive way,” particularly around advanced semiconductors and quantum technologies, which could help it decide how to scope new controls.

“Even the theft of intellectual property -- that's an area where BIS should have intimate knowledge of where the Chinese are targeting things,” Shriver said. If BIS were to be a member of the intelligence community, the agency would be able to more quickly say, “We're seeing [China] target things over here, we now need to make sure we're providing export control protections there.”

Shriver said he saw firsthand how this hurt BIS while Alan Estevez was undersecretary during the Biden administration. Estevez, a former senior Pentagon official, “basically became like a second-class citizen in terms of what he could drive out of the intelligence community,” Shriver said. “And I'm sure folks would say ‘Oh no, no, we always took good care of Alan.’ But in reality, when you're outside of the intelligence community, you're treated one way, and when you're inside, you're treated a different way.”

Shriver also said Congress should give BIS more funding, especially to improve its outdated information technology system. He said funding priorities often get divided into “defense and nondefense,” even though there are “a lot of things on the nondefense side -- BIS is obviously one of them -- that are vital.”

Craig Singleton, FDD's senior director for China and a former U.S. official who worked on China-related national security issues, said the government needs to get better at retaining its employees, especially within BIS. “The private sector, outside consulting firms, want to poach BIS. And so we train up this next generation of BIS leaders, and then they get offered three times their salary to leave,” he said. “How do we retain talent?”

Singleton said he thinks about how the government can create a system where “folks can get that experience in government, flow out, but then there's open portals to sort of work back and forth. And how can we do that in a way that's ethical and transparent?” He said the “lure of the private sector” is a “weakness in our system.”