On June 26, 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed its version of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (“FIRRMA”). Just over a week earlier, the U.S. Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, which incorporated its version of FIRRMA. The bills, which passed their respective chambers by very wide margins, would update the statute authorizing reviews of foreign investment by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS”) to reflect changes in CFIUS’s practice over the ten years since the last significant reform, expand CFIUS’s jurisdiction, and make significant procedural alterations to the CFIUS process. Introduced to “modernize and strengthen” review of foreign investment in the United States, FIRRMA would cement a relatively aggressive approach to foreign investment review. However, ultimately FIRRMA’s changes to current CFIUS practice are modest, and many of the changes merely codify practices in place since the later years of the Obama Administration.
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