Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios
Stronger limits on the export of U.S.-made technology are essential to containing threats from Russia and China, according to a new report shared first with Axios.
Between the lines: Export limits can play a powerful role in ensuring national security, but the agency responsible for managing those rules needs a bigger budget and staffing to carry out that mission, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
The big picture: Export controls are already playing a growing role in U.S. foreign policy, from limiting Russia's ability to access airline parts to slowing China's access to advanced chipmaking technology.
- "In the past few years, Trump and Biden administrations have both chosen to put tech competition at the heart of national security policy and have therefore similarly chosen to put tech export controls as one of the critical tools of U.S. national security policy," said Gregory Allen, one of the three authors of the report.
Between the lines: In order to be effective, though, Congress needs to beef up the budget for the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce Department unit responsible for enforcing such controls.
- "The amount of work that this small operation in the [Commerce Department] has been asked to perform has increased massively in the past 3 to 5 years," Allen said.
It's not just staffing at the agency that's inadequate, but also the underlying technology infrastructure it uses.
- "At a time when the need for robust U.S. export controls is more strategically critical than at any time since the end of the Cold War, BIS’s enabling technology is in a dreadful state," the report states.
- It notes that staffers rely on internal tools that are limited and crash-prone and still perform much of their work using a combination of Google searches and Microsoft Excel.
Zoom in: The report notes that export controls have helped limit Russia's warfighting machine, but adds that gaps remain.
- "Investigators have examined the wreckage of downed Russian weapons systems in Ukraine and found that they contain U.S. and allied components, including electronics that were manufactured years after the implementation of the 2014 Russia export controls," the report states.