BIS Official Tells Presidential Council Satellite Export Reforms Moving Ahead

Some provisions of the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2013, passed on May 18, “could cripple and certainly would delay substantially the overall Export Control Reform initiative,” said Undersecretary of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Eric Hirschhorn at a meeting of the President’s Export Council Subcommittee on Export Administration on Monday. Hirschhorn said he hopes the first ECR rules will be finalized this summer or fall.

The Department of Defense’s Section 1248 report on satellite export controls led to a “good deal” of briefings to Congress on satellites that “went very well,” said Hirschhorn, evidenced by the inclusion of an amendment that would restore the president’s authority to determine appropriate export controls for satellites in the NDAA for FY 2013. He said the BIS is working with those on Capitol Hill to try to ensure that the final version of that bill includes the satellite provision but not other provisions that could cripple or delay Export Control Reform. “The last thing we want to see,” said Hirschhorn, “is a situation where Congress gives with one hand and then immediately takes it away with the other by imposing conditions on transfer of satellite parts and satellite technology that are very difficult if impossible to meet."

The most egregious provision is enumeration of all parts, Hirschhorn said, saying if one were to try to list all of the thousands of parts in a satellite it could take lifetimes. A Senate bill introduced by Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., the Safeguarding U.S. Satellite Leadership and Security Act of 2012, is very close to what BIS wants for the final product, Hirschhorn said, but a bill that may be introduced by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., is very much like or is “perhaps even worse” than what passed the House.

Hirschhorn said BIS continues to move towards the first 38(f) congressional notifications to finalize the movement of categories from the United States Munitions List to the Commerce Control List (CCL), and hopes to give the first notifications this summer or fall. In response to concerns of BIS’ ability to handle the increased burden that will result from ECR, Hirschhorn said BIS has been assigned 24 new positions in export enforcement by the Department of Commerce, worth about $6 million per year.