October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and the threat foreign hackers pose to American businesses is higher than ever.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the White House in 2015, the two governments announced an understanding: neither would conduct nor knowingly support the cyber theft of commercial secrets. Eleven years later, American businesses are still fighting to protect their technology from foreign theft.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent laid it out bluntly this summer: “We are finding watermarks of our U.S. large language models on many of the Chinese models, and that’s unacceptable.” That is theft big enough to make the news. Most of it never does.
The threat goes far beyond stealing our advanced “super intelligence.” America’s 36.2 million small businesses are an increasingly attractive target for foreign adversaries looking to steal the next big American innovation. Small firms hold real technology — defense components, medical devices, software, and formulas built over decades of hard work and investment — yet they often lack the cyber defenses larger companies have in place.
It rarely looks like theft when it happens. It looks like an investor wanting to get in, a customer requesting a sample, a good engineer giving notice, or a vendor email with new wire instructions. The House Committee on Small Business, which I am proud to chair, held a hearing on this in March: “Defending Main Street: Combating CCP Threats to America’s Small Businesses.”
The takeaway was simple. If Apple cannot stop an engineer from walking out with its self-driving car secrets and heading to the airport with a ticket to China, what chance does a shop on Main Street have of protecting its own IP?
Cybercrime losses reported to the FBI reached a record $20.9 billion last year, and business email scams alone cost $3 billion. Eighty percent of economic espionage prosecutions in the U.S. allege conduct that benefits the Chinese state, and the FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence case roughly every 12 hours.
None of this has gone unanswered. President Donald Trump has confronted these threats more aggressively than any president in my lifetime. His “America First Investment Policy” turned the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States loose on combating adversary money in our most sensitive technologies. It cut off foreign adversaries’ access to American talent, especially in artificial intelligence.
In the House, Republicans have delivered.
This Congress, we’ve moved bill after bill to pull supply chains back from China, get capital to American manufacturers, and keep SBA assistance from reaching firms owned by our adversaries. The Working Families Tax Cuts, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, let shop owners write off new equipment the year they buy it, incentivizing made-in-America products instead of buying from China.
As foreign threats continue to grow, we still have more work to do. That is why I introduced the Combating Foreign Threats to Main Street Act with Rep. Derek Tran (D-CA). Our bill brings the Small Business Administration into a whole-of-government effort to combat these threats and gives Main Street tools to recognize and counter them before the damage is done.
MAIN STREET BETS DECADES ON AMERICA. WASHINGTON CAN’T LOOK PAST NOVEMBER
With it, owners would know the warning signs before signing, who is really behind a term sheet, how to strengthen their patents and supply chains, and which door to knock on when something looks wrong. Knowing the threat is the first line of defense, and right now, Main Street is going without it.
Our government knows what this threat looks like, and the people affected deserve to know it, too. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we have a duty to stand between Main Street and the foreign hackers targeting it.
Rep. Roger Williams represents the 25th District in Texas and is chairman of the House Committee on Small Business.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
