Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Notable

End BIS's power to overrule other agencies on export licenses

Not started

672 21. Department of Commerce

“Moreover, BIS’s authority to overrule other agency votes should be changed. Each agency should have one equal vote and, if a licensing dispute remains unresolved, the final decision should be elevated to the National Security Advisor and the Secretaries of Defense, State, Commerce, and Energy.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing found. BIS keeps the escalation authority Executive Order 12981 gives it; no order equalizes the agency votes or routes an unresolved license dispute to the National Security Advisor and the Secretaries of Defense, State, Commerce and Energy.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Shares #1849’s instrument and its negative search: grep -c '12981' fr-presdocu.ndjson = 0, Federal Register full text "12981" since 2025-01-20 = 7 documents, none presidential; presidential-actions.ndjson searched for export control, licensing and dispute.

Cluster negative search BIS-1 (chapter log): a jq pass over all 154 in-window Federal Register records whose agency is the Industry and Security Bureau — every Entity List, Unverified List, Denied Persons, Section 232 and licensing document of the window — plus quoted-phrase Federal Register full-text searches since 2025-01-20, plus the Bureau’s whole active Unified Agenda on reginfo.gov (agencyCd 0600, DOC/BIS: seventeen RINs, each opened and read). The one in-window change to how licenses are reviewed goes the other way on this ask’s logic — the January 2026 revision of the license review policy for advanced computing commodities moved certain semiconductors from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review by BIS rule, without any interagency escalation mechanism.

Reginfo agenda sweep, 2026-09-01 (§3b). The seventeen active RINs of the DOC/BIS slice of the 2026 Unified Agenda (agencyCd=0600, pubId=202510, published in the Federal Register 2026-08-14) were re-read against the rule settled 2026-09-01 — a dated agenda entry naming the ask’s object is attempted. No entry touches interagency voting on export license applications, which lives in EO 12981 rather than in the EAR and carries no RIN. Status unchanged.

Action
eliminate
Object
BIS authority to overrule other agency votes on export licenses
ID
1850