Right before the new year, President Biden signed a $1.7 trillion spending bill that includes a number of new priorities. Among them: Funding “to consider establishing a program to address the national security threats emanating from outbound investment.” Details, deadlines, and funding inside.
National security experts debated an outbound foreign investment regime at a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing. According to one expert, whatever the U.S. adopts, “we should be prepared for other countries to develop similar authorities.” Summary, details and testimony inside.
Three U.S. Senators and five Representatives, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, have sent a letter to President Biden urging his administration to “move forward with executive action” on an outbound foreign-investment review regime. Details and the actual letter are inside.
A national security screening mechanism for outbound investments was conspicuously absent from the $280 billion semiconductor bill passed by Congress last week. But the bill did include several outbound “guardrails,” and experts say the doors to an “outbound CFIUS” are still wide open.
A bipartisan group of Congressional leaders is working on a compromise that would create a new screening regime to review outbound investments in China and other adversarial nations. Experts have called the proposed regime “onerous.” A review and the latest updates are inside.
In the latest edition of our short video series “Ten Minutes On,” we discuss the potential for an outbound investment screening regime with expert and professor Sarah Bauerle Danzman. According to Danzman, the latest proposed regime would be “quite onerous.” All the details inside.
Buried inside the nearly 3,000-page America COMPETES Act is a proposal to create an interagency process to regulate outbound investments. Details on these “National Critical Capabilities Reviews,” which would be the corollary of the CFIUS inbound review process, are inside.