Washington, D.C. – Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) today reintroduced the bipartisan Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency (FACT) Act to counter the influence of China and other foreign adversaries on the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure.
Specifically, this bill would provide critical telecommunications transparency by requiring the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to publish a list of companies who hold FCC authorizations, licenses, or other grants of authority any ownership by foreign adversarial governments, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.
“I’m working to shine a light on the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party and our other foreign adversaries,” Stefanik said. “Allowing companies owned by China and our other foreign adversaries to have access to our critical infrastructure is playing with fire, and we must have transparency over the influence they can have over the lives of American citizens.”
“It’s critical for our national security that we understand the influence that foreign governments wield over our telecommunications infrastructure,” said Rep. Khanna. “This is a common-sense bipartisan bill to help us get the facts about which companies operating here in America are owned in part by countries like China.”
“I applaud Congresswoman Stefanik’s, Congressman Khanna, and Congressman Gallagher’s strong leadership and thoughtful work to counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party and other authoritarian state actors. This bipartisan legislation would strengthen American’s national security, and I encourage Congress to move quickly in passing this common sense bill,” said FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. “It is vital that we provide a full and transparent accounting of every entity with ties back into the CCP—and the governments of other authoritarian regimes—that are operating inside America’s tech and telecom markets, yet there has never been a public disclosure when it comes to those networks of relationships. This only makes it more difficult for the public and private sector alike to assess the likelihood that those connections can be leveraged to harm America’s national security interests. We know that the CCP is engaged in a widespread and coordinated campaign to surveil Americans, and they are willing to use every tool at their disposal to advance their malign goals. Indeed, one of the means by which the CCP does this is by exerting control over and exploiting vulnerabilities within global communications and technology supply chains. Increasing visibility into entities with FCC authorizations that have relationships with authoritarian regimes would bring much needed transparency and help strengthen America’s communications networks against threats from malign actors. So I am gratified to see bipartisan support in Congress for legislation to do just this.”
Read full text of the bill here.
