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

19. Department of Transportation · Minor

Withhold new aviation negotiations with China until it honors existing accords

Done

631 19. Department of Transportation

“China has failed to put in place several of the policies to which it has already agreed; the U.S. should not offer additional negotiations until the Chinese implement the agreements they have already signed.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    A refrain-from ask, sorted and leveled under playbook 3b: the United States is the actor and its own inaction — not offering additional negotiations — is the compliance, so the ask is `done` while no new round is offered and would become `reversed` the day one is. No new round was offered. Federal Register searches for "Air Transport Agreement" and for "People's Republic of China" within DOT return nothing about a new bilateral negotiation in either direction across the window, and the Chinese carriers' U.S. frequencies stayed at their existing level: DOT approved schedule supplements in docket DOT-OST-2020-0052 on 2025-10-23, 2026-02-11 and 2026-03-26 without expanding the cap. The one in-window instrument that addresses the bilateral relationship runs the Quote's way rather than against it. DOT's Order 2025-10-3 of 2025-10-09, an Order to Show Cause, proposes to condition every foreign air carrier permit and exemption held by seven Chinese carriers on compliance with Article 2(4) of the 1980 U.S.–China Civil Air Transport Agreement — enforcing a term China had already signed, which is precisely the premise on which the Quote says to withhold new negotiations. `done` and not `partial`: the ask is forbearance, and forbearance is not delivered in pieces.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Ticket 26 phase 2, rule batch q3 (2026-09-01): sorted as a refrain-from ask under playbook 3b and moved not started → done, event re-dated from 2026-09-01 (the date of the search) to 2025-10-09 (the dated instrument in the same posture). The earlier note framed the difficulty precisely — “an ask phrased as forbearance is hard to evidence in either direction, because the absence of a negotiation is not an act” — and 3b answers it: for a refrain-from ask the absence is the compliance, so the negative search is the finding rather than a failure to find one. The “unverifiable-by-construction” vocabulary question the note raised was settled without new vocabulary.
  • The negative reaches negotiations and published DOT action. It cannot reach an unannounced diplomatic overture; no source could.
  • The Chinese carriers’ U.S. frequencies remained at their existing level through the window: DOT approved supplements to their schedules in docket DOT-OST-2020-0052 on 2025-10-23, 2026-02-11 and 2026-03-26 without expanding the cap. Recorded as a lead — the docket entries are approvals of filings, not a statement of negotiating policy.
  • Read with #1732, which owns the Russian-airspace order itself.
Action
restrict
Object
U.S.–China aviation agreements and negotiations
ID
1733