On July 22, 2025, the US Senate unanimously passed the Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act (H.R. 1316), sending it to President Trump for his signature.
The Act would amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (“ECRA”) to require the Secretary of Commerce to submit an annual report to Congress on license applications, enforcement actions, and other requests for authorization handled by the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) for the export, reexport, release, and in-country transfer of items subject to the US Export Administration Regulations (“EAR”) to entities: (i) located in Country Group D:5 (countries subject to US arms embargoes, which includes China) and (ii) included on the Entity List or the Military End-User List (“MEU List”).
Background
ECRA provides broad authority to the President to implement dual-use export controls on sensitive technologies and provided permanent statutory authority for the EAR. The law required the President to establish an interagency process to impose controls on emerging and foundational technologies, as well as to develop a review of license requirements for exports, reexports, or in-country transfers of items to countries subject to a comprehensive U.S. arms embargo. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have used ECRA to impose a series of restrictions on Chinese trade and investment in telecommunications, advanced semiconductors, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Congress has continued to play a role in examining and updating the export control regime.
In December 2023, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee released the findings of a 90-day committee review of the BIS, which concluded that the Commerce Department was overly lax in approving exports of advanced technology to China and was prioritizing business arguments over national security concerns, which we discussed in an earlier blog post here. Experts say the Department needs to create a “paper trail” for congressional and other overseers to better monitor the end users and final destinations of dual-use technologies.
Licensing Transparency
The Act would require the annual report to include the following details for all applicable license applications or other requests for authorization:
- the name of the entity submitting the application;
- a brief description of the item and its Export Control Classification Number (aka “ECCN”);
- the name of the end-user;
- the end-user’s location;
- the value of the items;
- the agency’s decision with respect to the license application or authorization; and
- the date of the submission of the application.
In addition, the report would require Commerce to provide the date, location, and result of any related enforcement activities, such as end-use checks and aggregate statistics on all license applications and other requests for authorization.
As is the case with other submissions to BIS under ECRA, the information in the report would be exempt from public disclosure, except for aggregate statistics. It appears that the required reports would not capture all BIS submissions that involve “military end-users” or “military end-uses” under EAR § 744.21 because the MEU List is not exhaustive, but the Act only requires BIS to disclose submissions involving parties actually on the MEU List. The same issue may arise with the Entity List if BIS implements its reported plans to change the EAR such that (unlisted) subsidiaries and/or affiliates of Entity List parties would be subject to the same restrictions as listed parties.
