BIS is getting more funding—here's how to spend it

BIS is getting a significant funding boost, but not everything it wanted. It should prioritize force multipliers and unconventional hiring authorities.

Our long national (compute policy) nightmare is almost over—the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is finally getting more funding! There might still be a partial government shutdown over Department of Homeland Security funding, but the Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill, which includes BIS funding, is signed and sealed, and BIS will see a $44 million (23%) increase (see figure).

BIS is the US government agency that manages dual-use export controls, which means “stopping people from selling dangerous technology to companies outside the United States”. Since October 7, 2022, the exports BIS controls have come to include advanced chips used for training AI models, and the manufacturing equipment that makes those chips.

BIS funding is vital to the effectiveness of export controls—all the complex rules and clever policy ideas in the world mean nothing if BIS can’t actually enforce them. But all the BIS funding in the world means nothing if BIS can’t spend it effectively. BIS should prioritize force multipliers, like IT modernization, that increase the effectiveness of the staff it already has. BIS should also take advantage of unconventional hiring authorities so that, when it does add staff, it can bypass the often-brutal civil service process and get the right people fast.

What did BIS say it needed money for?

To understand how BIS plans to spend this money, we can look at the administration’s budget request. This is the official wish list, written by BIS’s political appointees and endorsed by the White House, of what BIS wants. This year, it asked for $303 million (a $112 million increase) to hire 193 more special agents, 18 more Export Control Officers (ECOs), and 19 more technical experts (see table). The request is focused entirely on boosting enforcement, which is reasonable given the scale of AI chip smuggling and other violations.

BIS agents, primarily based at US field offices, are the law enforcement officers who investigate violations of export controls. They typically leave the “door-kicking” and “shooting guns” to partner agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—most of a BIS agent’s daily work consists of reviewing export declarations, following up on leads, and knocking on companies’ doors to politely inform them that they should stop, or BIS will fine them eleventy million dollars. More BIS agents straightforwardly means less smuggling—more agents means more time to follow up on leads and catch bad guys.

ECOs, permanently stationed overseas, are vital jacks-of-all-trades who play law enforcement, advisory, and diplomatic roles. Their main responsibility is conducting end-use checks—physically visiting companies that receive US-origin items to make sure they’re not doing anything bad. However, because they’re permanently stationed overseas, they also play a key diplomatic role in engaging with foreign companies and governments. A typical day for an ECO might include visiting a suspected smuggler’s warehouse in the morning, meeting with a major multinational about a new BIS regulation in the afternoon, and going to a reception hosted by the local Ministry of Trade that night. They’re vital to BIS’s ability to stop diversion and cooperate with other countries.

Technical experts—often engineers, biologists, or chemists—provide technical knowledge to support enforcement or rulemaking. “Technical expert” is sort of a catchall term for all the various types of technology specialists BIS needs. BIS needs technical experts because it’s usually not obvious to anyone without a PhD whether a vial in a refrigerator contains bacteria for fermenting yogurt or for making bioweapons, or whether a computer chip is for playing video games or developing superintelligence. Technical experts support enforcement by answering those questions, and support BIS as a whole in understanding new technologies so it can figure out what to export control and how.

How should BIS prioritize the money it’s getting?

Though Congress is providing a significant increase, BIS is not getting everything it asked for. While the administration requested $303 million (+59%), only $235 million (+23%) was actually signed into law. BIS will have to make tough decisions about how to prioritize the new funding to meet enforcement needs.

One of the most important things BIS could invest in is something that wasn’t in the original budget request—IT modernization. Organizations like the Center for Strategic and International Studies have extensively documented the sorry state of BIS IT systems, and Congress has previously introduced legislation to appropriate supplemental BIS funding specifically for this purpose. The logic is simple—every additional agent adds one “unit” of capability, but better IT systems improve the productivity of every agent. This would be less true if BIS already had relatively good IT systems, but my sense is that BIS is far, far away from hitting diminishing returns on IT investments.

Once BIS has adequately funded IT modernization, it should invest in a balanced mix of ECOs and agents, perhaps with a slight bias towards agents. ECOs and agents both meaningfully boost BIS enforcement in complementary ways. ECOs help BIS detect shell companies and bad actors more rapidly by checking the actual fate of more exported goods, and also improve BIS’s coordination with foreign governments. More agents mean that BIS can follow up on more leads, leading to more disruption of smuggling networks before goods ever leave the United States. If BIS were intelligence-constrained, more agents would not be as useful, but per BIS’s own budget request, BIS agents typically handle caseloads far higher than criminal investigators at comparable agencies.¹

The lowest priority should be technical experts. Now is a good time for BIS to hire technical experts, for reasons related to hiring authorities discussed below. Additionally, the “force multiplier” argument is somewhat applicable to technical experts—better technical expertise to help agents identify possible diversion benefits every agent, although technical experts are not quite as cheaply scalable as software. However, technical experts may not contribute as directly to enforcement as the other priorities above.

Can BIS actually hire with this money?

The challenges and history of BIS IT modernization efforts could fill a separate post (and might soon), but on the staffing side, it can be hard for the US government to recruit candidates. Government pay follows a fixed scale based on education and experience, but the scale doesn’t care what kind of education and experience it is. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, both anthropologists and computer scientists typically require a Master’s degree, which would qualify them as GS-9 federal employees earning about $70,000. But in the private sector, the median pay for an anthropologist is $64,910 whereas for a computer scientist it is $140,910. This problem is much worse at higher levels of experience and in booming fields like AI—the government is not going to pay AI researchers $100 million signing bonuses like Meta.

But suppose money isn’t the main motivator—suppose the government only wants mission-driven candidates anyway, or is hiring in a field like law enforcement where the government is the only game in town. Even when salary isn’t an issue, it’s still incredibly hard to hire the right people. Unless the hiring agency gets Direct Hire Authority or another special carve-out, every hire needs to go through competitive civil service procedures. In theory, the point of these procedures is to make sure the government is absolutely fair. In reality, these procedures make government hiring timelines last months (or years, if you need security clearance) and introduce a massive arbitrary element, as resumes are reviewed and scored by department-level HR staff who have no idea what job is even being filled.

IAPS has published separate work on the challenges of attracting AI talent into the government and what we can do about it. It’s not just about money, but about being able to hire the people offices need, even when candidates are willing.

BIS may soon have some opportunities to bypass the standard process. Congress is considering the BIS STRENGTH Act, which would let BIS hire up to 25 specialized technical personnel outside the normal hiring process and pay them salaries competitive with the private sector. The Tech Force program is doing the same across government, with a specific focus on high-demand areas like AI, data science, and software engineering. These programs would significantly improve BIS’s access to quality candidates by simplifying the hiring process and increasing salary caps, and they make this an especially good time for BIS to be staffing up.

Even with NVIDIA H200 exports to China, this funding matters

In December, President Trump announced that NVIDIA H200s would be sold to China, and there was a great disturbance in the Force, as if a thousand compute policy watchers tweeted at once. BIS has since released the details of how advanced chip sales to China will be handled, and I published my own analysis about how the safeguards in the policy are effectively unenforceable. From a US-China competition perspective, selling potentially millions of H200s to China would be a Very Bad Thing.

At the same time, the most powerful Blackwell-generation chips are still restricted, and chip smuggling will continue to be a factor in China’s access to compute. BIS also needs stronger enforcement to prevent Huawei and other Chinese AI chip makers from making their own domestic products to compete against NVIDIA and others.

Funding BIS helps restrict China’s access to cutting-edge chips and builds in optionality for the US government to take a more aggressive export control approach if it so chooses. BIS should invest the new funding it has received in better systems and the right staff to continue protecting US national security for decades to come.

1. See page 3 of BIS’s FY2026 budget request, which says: “These threats have significantly increased the scope of BIS’s work to include a significant increase in exports under BIS licenses, and export enforcement officers handling on average 26 cases (and another 19 leads) per agent (far above comparable agencies).”