Require CFIUS review of Chinese greenfield investments

Research notes

Greenfield investment — building a new facility rather than acquiring an existing business — is outside section 721’s covered-transaction definition because there is no United States business to acquire, so the full closure of the gap would need a statute. That is why the memorandum’s promise to “seek … in consultation with the Congress” is the operative step.

requires_congress was cleared on 2026-09-01 in the ticket-26 phase-2 sweep, on the site owner’s own reading of this item (playbook §3b), and the clearing was confirmed by the owner the same day when the review put it back to them as the one item where §3b’s operative test and the Quote’s named addressee pull apart. The Quote opens “Congress should close the loophole”, and the reading that governs is that the act asked for — a CFIUS review assessing harm to national and economic security — is one an executive committee performs. The act asked for is a CFIUS review that assesses harm to national and economic security, and CFIUS is an executive committee: Treasury reaches part of the greenfield field already by regulation, through the covered-real-estate rules at 31 CFR part 802 and the list of sensitive sites it may extend by rulemaking. No such rulemaking was issued in the window — the Office of Investment Security filed only two Federal Register documents, a January 2025 penalty-inflation notice and the February 2026 streamlining request for information — so the Status is unchanged at attempted on the memorandum.

No bill in the 119th Congress would extend CFIUS to greenfield investments; H.R. 6707 (“CFIUSMCA Act”, referred 2025-12-15) and H.R. 8722 (an AFIDA memorandum-of-understanding bill, referred 2026-05-11) are the only CFIUS bills introduced and neither does it.