Trump deferral of China-aimed tech measures jeopardizes national security, lawmakers say

House Foreign Affairs Committee's top Democrat Gregory Meeks of New York and House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia subcommittee's top Democrat Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California have warned that the Commerce Department's decision to put off prohibitions on China Telecom's U.S. operations, as well as proposed sales and business bans on TP-Link, China Unicom, and China Mobile could be detrimental to U.S. national security, according to Reuters.

"The Administration's actions suggest a troubling pattern of sacrificing America's national and economic security to stabilize relations with China and resolve the trade war the President himself started," wrote Meeks and Kamlager-Dove in a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick has been urged by the lawmakers to not only explain to the committee the risk assessments conducted by the department on the shelving of China-targeted tech security measures but also confirm whether the department had been tasked to prioritize tech threats from other countries instead. The lawmakers' letter comes more than a month ahead of a meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who had reached a trade truce in October.