Bottom Line Up Front
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is scheduled to mark up national security-focused bills related to export controls to maintain America’s technological edge in the competition with Beijing when it meets on Wednesday, April 22. FDD Action urges Members to support fifteen critical and bipartisan pieces of legislation.
FDD Action urges members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to vote “Yes” on all fifteen bills described below during the markup on April 22.
Markup at a Glance
Committee
House Foreign Affairs Committee (Full Committee)
Chairman
Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL)
Date & Time
Wednesday, April 22, 2026 — 10:00 a.m.
Location
2172 Rayburn House Office Building
Bills Endorsed
15 export controls and BIS-related bills
FDD Action Expert Analysis
“The United States is in a global AI arms race with the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why America’s cutting-edge chips and advanced technology should not power the AI systems that support China’s military and security state, especially at the expense of American innovators. This slate of export control bills would significantly enhance the protection of advanced American technology and strengthen U.S. national security. FDD Action is proud to endorse these bills.”
— Connor Pfeiffer, Senior Director of Government Relations at FDD Action
Legislation FDD Action Endorses
FDD Action supports the following fifteen measures and urges a “Yes” vote on each.
- ✔Multilateral Alignment of Technology Controls on Hardware (MATCH) Act (H.R. 8170) — Led by Reps. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) and John Mannion (D-NY), this bill closes the allied gap in semiconductor export controls by giving the Netherlands, Japan, and other allied chipmaking tool suppliers 150 days to match U.S. restrictions on exports to Chinese chipmakers. If allies fail to comply, the bill requires BIS to extend U.S. jurisdiction over all allied chipmaking tools built with American technology.
- ✔ECRA Statute of Limitations Extension (H.R. 8202) — Led by Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) and Joaquin Castro (D-TX), this bill extends the Export Control Reform Act of 2018’s statute of limitations from five to ten years for both civil and criminal violations.
- ✔Export Control Enforcement and Enhancement Act (H.R. 8169) — Led by Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), this bill strengthens the Entity List process by establishing an expedited 30-day voting requirement for the End-User Review Committee on proposals to add, remove, or modify entity listings. It also mandates a presumption of denial for export licenses involving entities added under these new expedited procedures.
- ✔Export Controls Enforcement Act (H.R. 4505) — Led by Reps. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) and Bill Huizenga (R-MI), this bill strengthens enforcement of U.S. export controls by deploying export control officers to U.S. diplomatic posts to conduct inspections, prevent illegal diversion of sensitive technologies, and coordinate with foreign governments.
- ✔BIS Strategic Talent Recruitment to Enhance National Guardrails for Technological Handling (STRENGTH) Act (H.R. 7003) — Led by Reps. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) and Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA), this bill authorizes BIS to hire highly qualified technical experts — including semiconductor engineers, AI researchers, and cybersecurity analysts — outside normal civil service rules at competitive pay, filling critical expertise gaps at BIS.
- ✔ECRA Penalty Increase Act (H.R. 5853) — Led by Rep. Keith Self (R-TX), this bill strengthens deterrence against export control violations by increasing the transaction-based civil penalty cap from 2x to 4x the value of the transaction and raising the flat civil penalty ceiling from $300,000 to $1.2 million per violation.
- ✔Addressing Dangerous Vulnerabilities in Exports and Research to Strategic Adversaries, Regimes, and Industrial Entities of Security Concern (ADVERSARIES) Act (H.R. 6331) — Led by Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), this bill requires BIS’s Office of Information and Communications Technology and Services to study the “foreign person” loophole that allows Chinese companies to acquire U.S. technology through U.S.-based subsidiaries. It also requires the office to assess the national security risks posed by foreign adversary-controlled connected technologies operating within the United States.
- ✔BIS IT Modernization Act (H.R. 4920) — Led by Reps. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Thomas Kean (R-NJ), this bill directs BIS to upgrade technology systems with advanced data analytics, AI, and improved data-sharing capabilities to better detect illicit trade, shell companies, and other export control evasion schemes.
- ✔Biological Intellectual Property Protection Act (H.R. 6624) — Led by Reps. Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), this bill creates a new export control licensing requirement for transfers of synthetic DNA and RNA sequences to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, protecting sensitive U.S. biotechnology data from foreign adversaries seeking to steal American intellectual property for military or strategic purposes.
- ✔Full AI Stack Export Promotion Act (H.R. 6996) — Led by Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), this bill would facilitate the secure export of the full U.S. AI stack — the chips, software, and infrastructure that power AI systems — to trusted partners through diplomacy and industry consortia.
- ✔Semiconductor Technology Resilience, Integrity, and Defense Enhancement (STRIDE) Act (H.R. 6058) — Led by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), this bill directs the Secretary of State to engage in diplomacy to align U.S. and allied export controls across the full semiconductor supply chain, including manufacturing equipment, design tools, intellectual property transfers, and technical assistance. It also requires quarterly reporting by the Secretary to Congress on the status of multilateral engagement.
- ✔Stop Stealing Our Chips Act (H.R. 6322) — Led by Reps. Thomas Kean (R-NJ) and Julie Johnson (D-TX), this bill creates an export control whistleblower incentive program, offering 10–30% of fines collected when information leads to enforcement actions exceeding $1 million. The program will dramatically expand BIS’s ability to detect illicit chip diversion networks.
- ✔Deterring American AI Model Theft Act (H.R. 8283) — Led by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), this bill addresses the growing crisis of Chinese AI firms conducting “model extraction attacks” against U.S. frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The bill establishes a public “AI Model Extraction Attackers List” and makes perpetrators eligible for Entity Listing and blocking sanctions. It also closes a critical loophole through which China circumvents AI chip export controls by distilling U.S. closed-source models instead of training their own.
- ✔Bureau of Industry and Security License Administration Enhancement Act (H.R. 8284) — Led by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), this bill addresses multiple systemic challenges in the export control process, including by requiring BIS “is informed” letters to go through interagency review and clarifying the presumption of denial standard. It also reforms Technical Advisory Committees to better serve policymakers and requires a review of the Foundry Due Diligence rule.
- ✔Interagency Coordination in Export Controls Act (H.R. 8036) — Led by Rep. James Baird (R-IN), this bill allows the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy to directly propose new export control rules for a 30-day interagency vote, enabling faster responses to foreign adversary threats, with initial studies directed at ally exemptions and China’s military-civil fusion strategy.
Strengthening U.S. Export Controls is a Critical National Security Priority
Last week, FDD Action hosted a Secure Line briefing about why U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips and chipmaking equipment are one of the most consequential national security tools available to Congress. Read the full readout here.
- Chip security is national security: America’s lead in advanced AI chips is critical to U.S. national security. As former Deputy National Security Advisor and FDD China Program Chair Matt Pottinger told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 14, “AI isn’t just a pivotal technology. It is the pivotal technology that will determine whether the United States and its allies, or an axis of totalitarian regimes, control the means to lead in virtually all technologies, military and commercial.”
- China is evading current export controls: Chinese AI companies are circumventing current U.S. export controls by smuggling advanced chips into China. On March 19, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment revealing a major operation to smuggle more than $2.5 billion of AI servers containing Nvidia chips to Chinese customers in violation of U.S. export controls (more on the case here). On February 23, Reuters reported that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI company, trained its latest model on Blackwell chips — Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip — that were smuggled into China, despite U.S. export controls barring their export to the country.
- Beijing is desperate for an AI leg-up: Beijing is stealing U.S. chips because it is behind in the AI arms race. As Chris McGuire, a former U.S. official who worked on AI policy, explained, “The best U.S. AI chips are currently about five times more powerful than Huawei’s best offerings. By 2027, that gap will widen to seventeen times.” Chinese tech founders have explicitly stated that limits on accessing computing power, not money or engineers, are the main brake on scaling and innovation.
- Export controls deny adversaries access to this stack: Advanced AI runs on compute, and the most capable compute still depends on American and allied chokepoints — the chips themselves, the tools that make them, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging, and the cloud and model ecosystems around them. Export controls are one of the few non-kinetic tools available to deny adversaries like the People’s Republic of China access to this stack.
- Statutory controls enhance U.S. leverage and provide certainty for industry: Export controls imposed only through executive action are vulnerable to waiver, reinterpretation, and political bargaining across administrations. Controls and related processes enshrined in statute, however, set the floor of America’s negotiating position. They make policy durable across administrations, prevent Beijing from treating every summit as a chance to unwind rules, and give U.S. innovators the predictability they need to invest.