Export Grants

Posts Tagged ‘export restrictions’

Barack Obama believes that updating export restrictions with historic roots in the Cold War to help create new jobs and boost economic growth.

We are losing business opportunities unnecessarily. We’re also, I actually think, impeding effective monitoring of our national security because if you have export controls across everything you’re not spending time focusing on the handful of things that really do touch on sensitive national security. It’s going to be entirely grounded in our national security needs but I think will have a strong potential impact on where we can go in terms of exports. This is something we believe in and we want to continue to pursue.

U.S. companies have complained for years that they are loosing out on lucrative government sponsored contracts to Europe and Asia because many rules were put in place 30 years ago to prevent high value technology to find its way to Russia. Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to lay out plans for revamping U.S. export controls in the coming days to help facilitate this. The Milken Institute recently completed a study sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers and they estimate that modernizing these controls would boost economic output by $65 billion dollars and have the potential to create over 150,000 manufacturing jobs.

Export controls were last attempted to be revamped early in 2001, however when the September 11th attacks took place, these negotiation never were able to be put to a vote through congress. Currently exports of high technological value are approved on a transaction-by-transaction approach which has a huge backlog. Changes will also help different government agencies to work together rather then with competing goals.