September 3, 2026, 15:39 GMT | Comment
Companies and investors subject to US national security agreements are facing fewer on-site inspections under President Donald Trump, as his administration scales back a Biden-era expansion of mitigation oversight by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. The committee conducted 40 on-site mitigation inspections in 2025, down from 79 in 2024. The 2024 figure compared with a five-year average of 47; the peak in 2024 was likely due to a Biden-era policy focused on increased compliance.
Companies and investors subject to US national security agreements are facing fewer on-site inspections under President Donald Trump, as his administration scales back a Biden-era expansion of mitigation oversight by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (
CFIUS).
CFIUS conducted 40 on-site mitigation inspections in 2025, down from 79 in 2024. The 2024 figure compared with a five-year average of 47. The peak in 2024 was likely due to a Biden-era policy focused on increased compliance. If the spike year is removed, the average for the other four years is 39.
The committee terminated 23 mitigation agreements in 2025, broadly in line with the 25 that were terminated in 2024. CFIUS terminated 15 in 2023, 16 in 2022 and eight in 2021, according to the committee’s annual reports (see
here)
Trump’s America First Investment Policy, announced in February 2025, criticized “overly bureaucratic, complex, and open-ended” mitigation agreements. The policy said mitigation generally should consist of concrete actions that can be completed within a specified period rather than perpetual compliance obligations (see
here).
The decline in inspections could mean less scrutiny for companies and investors. It could also provide more opportunities to amend or terminate older national security agreements, or NSAs, that no longer address current risks.
Companies have said the agreements are costly and time-consuming to administer and that some older agreements have become outdated.
“Trump wants fewer burdens, less drag, fewer long-term agreements and more immediate solutions, like divestitures of high-risk business units … that show they solved the problem without need for a long monitoring tail,” said Colin Costello, a
Freshfields attorney who served as the intelligence community’s primary representative to CFIUS from 2016 to 2020.
“One of the main targets for review are these ‘Zombie’ [national security agreements]; these are generally very old NSAs that don’t serve a purpose anymore because the risk they were intended to mitigate has abated or is now mitigated by other government authorities,” he said.
Costello cautioned that although Trump prefers structural remedies or other permanent solutions to security concerns, there will be “a lot less daylight” between the Biden and Trump administrations when it comes to enforcing agreements and penalizing violations.
Most violations are self-reported, and the government is often forgiving of first-time offenders, Costello said. But CFIUS staff investigate violations before referring them to political leaders with recommendations.
“At that point, the case will be airtight,” Costello said.
Many NSAs contain change-in-circumstances clauses allowing them to be amended or terminated when they are no longer needed to address national security concerns, Costello said. Circumstances can change when new regulations address the relevant risk or when the risk dissipates over time.
Costello said Trump’s policy also is intended to encourage companies to approach the government about older agreements.
“The government is saying it wants companies to come to them if they think they have one of these legacy NSAs that don’t work anymore. ‘We’ll discuss it and create a waiver to amend it or terminate it. Don’t be shy telling us,’” he said.
— Biden-era enforcement —
At the second annual CFIUS conference in September 2023, Paul Rosen, then assistant secretary for investment security at the Treasury Department, said CFIUS was “renewing our focus on compliance” and that parties could expect “more compliance checks, questions, and site-visits.”
Companies had begun seeing increased site-visit activity and “can expect more of that,” Rosen said.
At the third annual CFIUS conference in November 2024, during the last months of President Joe Biden's administration, Rosen said CFIUS had “transformed how we approach compliance with mitigation agreements.”
Treasury had expanded its monitoring resources, he said, “nearly doubling the size of Treasury’s team over the last several years,” including by hiring personnel with audit and compliance experience.
— Biden-era staffing —
The Biden administration’s final Treasury budget request for fiscal 2025 sought additional resources to manage CFIUS’s workload, including “mitigation monitoring.”
The budget table showed staffing for Treasury’s CFIUS program rising from 88 full-time-equivalent employees, or FTEs, in fiscal 2023 to 122 under the fiscal 2024 annualized continuing resolution. The administration requested 138 FTEs for fiscal 2025.
The increase from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024 was about 39 percent.
— Risks of reduced oversight —
Scaling back mitigation oversight could reduce compliance costs and allow companies to direct resources elsewhere. But the shift also raises questions about whether companies will continue to comply with their national security agreements if inspections decline, and whether fewer mitigation measures could leave security risks unaddressed.
For now, the 2025 figures suggest that inspections have returned to their historical range after the Biden-era surge, rather than demonstrating a wholesale retreat from enforcement. Whether the change produces a more focused mitigation program or leaves gaps in oversight will become clearer as CFIUS reports future violations, penalties and agreement terminations.
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