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

26. Trade · Notable · Contested — excluded from counts

Prohibit all Chinese investment in high-technology industries

Attempted

789 26. Trade · from “The Case for Fair Trade”

“Prohibit all Communist Chinese investment in high-technology industries.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The only CFIUS rulemaking Treasury has opened in the window implements the memorandum's other half. The Known Investor Program request for information is about streamlining review and speeding investment from allied sources; it proposes no new restriction on PRC-affiliated investors. Eighteen months after the memorandum, no rule prohibits Chinese investment in United States high-technology industries.

  2. Attempted

    The America First Investment Policy memorandum states the policy in almost the Quote's terms - the United States "will establish new rules to stop ... PRC-affiliated persons from buying up critical American businesses and assets" and "will use all necessary legal instruments, including [CFIUS], to restrict PRC-affiliated persons from investing in United States technology, critical infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture, energy, raw materials, or other strategic sectors" - but it directs rules to be written rather than writing them, and section 2(h) expressly preserves passive investment from all foreign persons. It is not published in the Federal Register; it exists only on whitehouse.gov.

Research log

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

Research notes

The America First Investment Policy memorandum is the hinge document for five items on printed page 789 - this one, #2082, #2083, #2085 and, at one remove, #2084 - and it is a good example of the trap in source-apis.md: a presidential memorandum can exist without ever entering the Federal Register. A full-text search of the Federal Register for “America First Investment Policy” returns seven documents, all of them other agencies citing it, and none of them the memorandum.

The memorandum also puts EO 14105 (outbound investment in countries of concern) “under review” rather than expanding it; no successor rule has been published. Treasury’s outbound-investment regulations at 31 CFR part 850 took effect on 2025-01-02, before the window, and were not amended in it - the only Federal Register document touching them is a civil-penalty inflation adjustment of 2025-01-29.

Action
restrict
Object
Chinese investment in U.S. high-technology industries
ID
2081