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Washington, D.C. – House Foreign Affairs Committee Lead Republican Michael McCaul has issued the following statement, to draw attention to the misleading claims made by Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Acting Undersecretary and Deputy Undersecretary Jeremy Pelter at yesterday’s hearing at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. In his testimony, Pelter misled the Commissioners about BIS transparency with Congress on export control licensing decisions.

“Under Secretary Pelter’s answers yesterday at the Commission on the transparency of export control licensing decisions with Congress misrepresents the facts. To date, Congress and the general public have been provided no comprehensive data on licenses granted or denied for companies under export control restrictions, such as Huawei, SMIC, or any CCP-controlled company that is facilitating genocide. When I formally requested this information from BIS, it was unreasonably delayed and incomplete. If Mr. Pelter is serious about working constructively with Congress, it starts with basic transparency and accountability. Bureaucratic speak is unproductive as the CCP finds ways to use U.S. technology for its hypersonics programs and DNA data bases for Uyghurs.”

In November of last year, Lead Republican McCaul formally requested statistics on licensing for decisions for military end-users, entity listings, the foreign direct product rule, and others. It took BIS more than six months to respond to this request – and they only provided data for a limited number of entities over a limited period of time when they did. When questioned why all the requested data was not provided, BIS replied that providing the full information we requested would take too much effort. However, that information he requested appeared in a Reuters article, making it very clear BIS could have provided it to Congress when asked.