BIS Nominee Breezes Through Nomination Hearing

Sharing the dais with several other high-profile nominees, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration-designate Landon Heid appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, April 10.     

"I would just say as a general matter, there is no more sophisticated actor on the planet than the CCP as far as it goes to overt and covert collection of US technology.  And it is well known pattern and practice that they use a variety of intermediaries and 3rd party carve outs and third countries to get their hands on US technology that would be otherwise denied," said Mr. Heid.

While his remarks avoided specific policy commitments, in response to senators’ questions he discussed the following:

1. Treatment of subsidiaries under export control regulations. "So if you put an entity on the entity list and it's got a subsidiary, the restriction you put on the entity list company doesn't apply to its own subsidiary, right? We've solved this in sanctions going back decades.  It's called a 50 + 1 rule where if you're a subsidiary of sanction entities, you get whacked too. We don't have that for export controls...It's a simple fix you could do relatively quickly. These are the kind of things we're gonna be talking about and moving very quickly on to solve."
2. Treatment of Hong Kong as a PRC region. "So this is something that from day one, we're going to hit the ground running on and adjudicate very heavily," he said.

Drawing on experience as a diplomat and congressional staffer, he described the CCP’s strategic programs—such as military-civil fusion and dual-circulation—as serious threats to U.S. national and economic security. He argued that emerging technologies (AI, quantum computing, biotech, semiconductors) are central to global power competition and that the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) plays a pivotal role in safeguarding U.S. leadership.

Heid stressed the bipartisan tradition of export controls, citing actions by Presidents Trump and Biden to restrict technology transfers to CCP-linked entities, as well as underscoring the the necessity of allied cooperation, given the global nature of advanced technology supply chains.

Mr. Heid recently served as technology policy adviser for the House Select Committee on China, with prior posts as a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Office of China Coordination, where he concentrated on export controls and U.S.-China technological competition.