House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, has initiated a three-month review of the Bureau of Industry and Security within the U.S. Department of Commerce as he seeks a complete accounting of export control licenses that the bureau has granted to China, C4ISRNET reported Monday.

McCaul noted in his Jan. 20 letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that the agency has provided Congress with a snapshot of China export control approvals and denials over a six-month period.

“It showed that less than 1 percent [of licenses] were declined and $60 billion went into Huawei and $40 billion went to SMIC,” the lawmaker said.

“We do want a reporting requirement because they never report to the public on export licenses,” stated McCaul. “We want a full accounting of that.”

Findings from the review are expected to inform potential reforms to the export control process of the bureau that oversees the sale of sensitive and dual-use equipment.

The Wall Street Journal reported that since 2020, China’s nuclear weapons research institute has managed to buy semiconductors produced by Intel and Nvidia from resellers despite its inclusion in a U.S. export blacklist stretching back to 1997.

WSJ examined procurement documents and found that the state-owned China Academy of Engineering Physics’ laboratory focused on studying computational fluid dynamics—which involves modeling nuclear blasts—purchased many of those chips.

Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security said U.S. and foreign entities should conduct due diligence to prevent software and other technologies from ending up into the hands of institutions included in the entity list.

“As mass-market products move through multiple parties in global supply chains, full visibility on ultimate end users is a large undertaking,” the agency commented.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Economic Indicator Monitoring contract is evidence of NGA’s integration of commercial GEOINT, analytics and other platforms and services into its workflows to further advance national security missions and capabilities.

“EIM demonstrates how we can strengthen our national security and global partnerships when we harmonize our government capabilities with those of the commercial sector,” Shelby Pierson, deputy director of NGA’s source management and operations component, said in a statement published Monday.

Under EIM, NGA has broadened its collection and analysis capabilities, enabling the agency to provide situational awareness to GEOINT analysts.

“This type of holistic approach, which was jointly developed by Source and Analysis, uses the full spectrum of tools and diverse sources available to us as a GEOINT community … helping ensure we get the right data to the right users at the right time,’’ Pierson noted.

NGA said it plans to continue procuring unclassified commercial GEOINT using analytical methods, computer vision detections, nontraditional sources and artificial intelligence and machine learning models through EIM.

In November, NGA increased the ceiling value of the EIM contract — which was originally awarded to five vendors in August 2021 — to $60 million.

The Department of Defense’s office of the undersecretary for research and engineering has launched a project that seeks to establish a network of local facilities across the U.S. to advance the development of microelectronics prototypes as part of efforts to reduce dependence on other countries for such technology components.

The five-year Microelectronics Commons project will pursue the development of prototypes in six technological fields: secure edge computing and internet of things; quantum technology; 5G/6G technology; electromagnetic warfare; artificial intelligence hardware; and commercial leap ahead technologies, the National Security Technology Accelerator said Monday.

The CHIPS and Science Act-funded project aims to encourage lab-to-fab transition of microelectronics technologies and support semiconductor workforce training initiatives.

“We want to expedite the lab-to-fab prototyping as well as closely couple the R&D innovation with the manufacturing,” said Dev Shenoy, principal director for microelectronics within OUSD(R&E).

A request for solutions for the Microelectronics Commons project has been issued through the NSTXL-managed Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems other transaction authority vehicle calling for industry stakeholders to develop prototypes and demonstrate their capabilities in those tech areas.

Proposed platforms for the project are due Feb. 28.