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

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Give the BIS Under Secretary lead authority over export license disputes

Not started

672 21. Department of Commerce

“The Assistant Secretary does not need to lead the dispute resolution, and this process should be revised by giving lead authority to BIS’s Under Secretary, who is better able to account for diverging views.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing found. Export license dispute resolution still runs under Executive Order 12981 as it stood before the window: no amendment to that order was signed, and no Commerce delegation moves lead authority from the Assistant Secretary for Export Administration to the Under Secretary.

    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

The instrument for this ask is an amendment to EO 12981 (Administration of Export Controls). grep -c '12981' fr-presdocu.ndjson returns 0, and a Federal Register full-text search for "12981" since 2025-01-20 returns seven documents, none of them presidential and none about export licensing. presidential-actions.ndjson carries no export-control administration order.

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). Also checked: the Commerce Department slice of fr-notice.ndjson for delegations of authority (nine records, all Foreign-Trade Zone reorganizations).

This ask and #1850 share one instrument and are leveled together.

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 the interagency license dispute-resolution process of EO 12981, which is an executive order rather than an EAR provision and carries no RIN. Status unchanged.

Action
transfer
Object
lead authority over export license dispute resolution
ID
1849