On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street,” Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) criticized the Trump administration’s deal to allow NVIDIA to sell a chip to China in exchange for a percentage of the sales to China and said doing so gives the government an incentive to “relax export controls in the name of bringing in revenue to the federal government.”
Host Maria Bartiromo asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:35] “[Y]ou have your own op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing President Trump’s trade deal allowing U.S. companies to sell advanced semiconductor and AI chips and systems to China, while paying our government a percentage of those sales. The President now also wants the U.S. government to own a piece of Intel, mulling a 10% stake. What [are] your thoughts on all of this? And tell me what troubles you most about the government getting a piece of that revenue, sales to China on those chips.”
Moolenaar answered, “I think it creates the wrong incentives. Because what it does is, basically, creates incentives for government agencies to try and relax export controls in the name of bringing in revenue to the federal government. And I believe that export controls are there to prevent the military-industrial complex of China, Russia, and North Korea, Iran, adversarial nations from growing in their technical capabilities. And, ultimately, those technical capabilities could be used against our men and women in the armed forces.”
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