Fact Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. FISCHER. Madam President, last week, my bill, the Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency Act, or the FACT Act, cleared the Commerce Committee unanimously. Now it will come before us here on the Senate floor for a vote.

I stand before you today because the threat our foreign adversaries pose is not a distant concern. It is real; it is relentless; and it is constantly evolving. We cannot afford to wait and deal with the consequences. The cost of inaction is too great.

Congress must anticipate the threats, and we must work together to curb the malign influence of foreign adversaries like communist China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. For too long now, we have allowed foreign adversarial governments to secure a silent foothold in our telecommunications infrastructure.

Take, for example, Huawei. Huawei, a Chinese-owned telecommunications giant, is one of the leading producers of cell phone network equipment. This equipment spans across our country and finds its home in most of our cellular devices. Over a decade ago, our intelligence Agencies began noticing a peculiar pattern of Huawei equipment on cell towers across my home State of Nebraska as well as nearby Colorado and Montana. That Chinese gear was clustered near sensitive military assets, including Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base and our nuclear missile silos.

Then, just 4 years ago, U.S. intelligence officials sounded the alarm. Their investigations found that Huawei could secretly access mobile phone networks around the world through backdoors, unbeknownst to carriers. And perhaps even more concerning, Huawei has had this capability for more than a decade.

And Huawei's ownership is bankrolled by billions of dollars from the Chinese Government. What government freely hands over that kind of money without expecting something in return? Despite being based in China and having deep connections to the Chinese Communist Party, as confirmed by U.S. intelligence communities, the company continues to refuse to acknowledge the Chinese Government's influence.

However, in 2020, under President Trump's administration, the Federal Communications Commission designated Huawei as a national security threat, and it banned the sale of its telecommunications equipment here in our country. This past December, Congress also secured the remaining funding to enable smaller rural communications companies to rip that risky Chinese-made equipment out of their networks.

In 2022, the Justice Department charged two Chinese intelligence officers with an unsettling crime: attempting to obstruct a Federal investigation into Huawei by stealing sensitive case material from a U.S. District Attorney's Office.

Colleagues, I pose to you this question: Why would the Chinese Government go to such lengths to interfere in a case involving a so- called private company in which they have no stake?

Well, they wouldn't.

While recent actions to curtail Huawei equipment and those from other high-risk Chinese firms are steps in the right direction, they don't go far enough. We must have far greater transparency about which companies holding Federal communication licenses and authorizations also have influential ties to foreign adversarial governments, and we must look deeper at who has this access and how many more companies like Huawei are out there.

Companies like Huawei must be stopped. We can no longer permit authoritarian regimes like China to infiltrate our networks and lurk in the shadows, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. It is not enough to brace ourselves for the aftermath of disaster. We must root out the threat before it has time to fester.

The reality is this: Our foreign adversaries have stakes in numerous companies operating freely and legally within the United States. Yet, in many cases, the public remains unaware which companies are owned, wholly or partially, by these adversaries.

That is why, today, I call upon the Senate to pass my FACT Act, which takes a much needed step to strengthen our visibility into our telecommunications market to weed out that access that we have seen from these malicious adversaries because the first step--the first step--in defending our national security is understanding the threat.

My bill directs the Federal Communications Commission to publicly identify these companies, the ones that have that FCC license or authorization, that are owned by foreign adversarial governments. Under the FACT Act, companies with foreign ties will no longer be able to operate in secrecy, and they will no longer be able to conceal their financial backers or obscure their true loyalties.

Huawei should serve as a warning. China is on the offensive to undermine the security of America's communications. An attack on our networks is a direct attack on the United States, and it is not one that we should tolerate.

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