by Carl Mack
With the midterm elections looming and Democrats seemingly with the advantage to retake the U.S. House, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York is soon poised to assume the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This is a critical position that influences America’s role in the world, America’s relationships with key allies, and how we compete on technologies of the future like artificial intelligence, semiconductor, and robotics, to name a few.
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Given his seniority, including an impressive 28-year tenure, Rep. Meeks can effectively drive congressional policy on China, export controls, and the Tech sector – all critical elements of securing America’s technological and economic advantage. This has historically been the role of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – identify mid-to-long term opportunities and threats from abroad, and ensure the U.S. is prepared to address them.
Unfortunately, in recent years, Congress has started trying to micro-manage solutions and legislate at the level best left to technical experts elsewhere in government. That’s a job that should stay in purview of places like the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and the Commerce Department. Rep. Meeks represents a chance to reassert Congress’s appropriate role setting strategic direction, identifying system blind spots and letting agencies handle implementation within the framework Congress sets.
As an example of how Congress losing its strategic focus, lawmakers have spent recent years debating export control policy for advanced semiconductors, struggling to maintain a working relationship with China while also implementing proper security controls. Still, our existing frameworks have noticeable gaps, including a loophole related to open-source technology, even as China is nipping at our heels. RISC-V — an open-source chip architecture originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, that lets hardware designers build semiconductors at scale without paying licensing fees — is the most visible example, but it’s a symptom of a broader gap: export control policy that has no coherent approach to open-source technology at all, whether in chip architecture, AI model weights, or software toolchains.
This instinct toward granularity has seemingly become the default mode for the current Congress. The MATCH Act, advanced by House Republicans, writes the names of specific Chinese semiconductor firms and specific categories of manufacturing equipment directly into statute — inviting Beijing to simply route its supply chains around those names within months. The GAIN AI Act takes the same approach one step further, dictating chip-by-chip certification requirements that read more like licensing regulation than legislation.
Recent legislation on the Hill, like the export control package put forward by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, of which Rep. Meeks currently serves as the most senior Democrat, has drawn significant attention to issues related to China, but Congress has yet to close the broader gap around open-source technology.
Countries like China have taken advantage of these loopholes to circumvent Western sanctions and reduce dependence on technology made elsewhere. Chinese state institutions — scores of which have U.S. sanctions placed upon them — have spent at least $50 million on RISC-V-related projects between 2018 and 2023, according to a 2024 Reuters analysis, and mobilized national champions like Huawei behind the effort. With its full embrace of the path around our country’s semiconductor restrictions, China has bolstered a much broader strategy—one in which there is no meaningful distinction between civilian and military uses of advanced technology. The lack of explicit guidelines creates uncertainty for our national security. U.S.-based companies trying to compete responsibly in the global market are also hobbled in the broader contest for AI leadership.
To counter this scattershot approach, the Foreign Affairs Committee should take the lead and expand the current export control framework to include guardrails against these loopholes. Rep. Meeks is just the person who could convene a review of where the framework is and isn’t working. Congress needs to think bigger and stop defaulting to a piecemeal approach.
During his last stint as chairman of the committee, the congressman had already framed China as a top-tier priority, warning repeatedly that disengagement from America creates a vacuum that Beijing is all too eager to fill. In December of last year, he introduced the RESTRICT Act, a bill that would ban the sale of advanced AI chips like the H200 to China, following the announcement that President Trump had approved such a deal.
“That decision not only risks undercutting U.S. dominance in the AI race but also compromises our national security by giving those capabilities directly to our chief strategic competitor,” Rep. Meeks said when announcing the bill.
He’s also worked across the aisle. Two months after the RESTRICT Act was introduced, he co-authored a letter with the current chair, Republican Congressman Brian Mast, to the Departments of State and Commerce, urging them to tighten their alliance on semiconductor-equipment export controls. That bipartisan spirit and longer-term vision of how the U.S. should address these threats is exactly what a measure that focuses on guardrails for open-source technology would need to get across the finish line.
The practical path would be for Rep. Meeks to lead a review on open-source governance, update guidance for the BIS, and coordinate with allies in both political parties. It is a natural extension of how he has already conducted himself in Congress.
Rep. Meeks has yet to act on these issues, but he is well positioned to do so sooner rather than later. American competitiveness is at stake.
Dr. Mack is former executive director of the National Society of Black Engineers.
