Why Some China Hawks Worry about the Senate’s Bipartisan TikTok Bill

A bipartisan bill with the support of a growing group of senators and the White House could be used to ban TikTok — but some China hawks are warning that passing the measure, called the RESTRICT Act, would make a ban more elusive.

One Senate GOP aide told National Review that the bill was “not just a recipe, but a greater excuse for further inaction.”

In an abysmal months-long run for TikTok, media reports have revealed further evidence of data breaches and company executives’ reluctance to run afoul of Beijing’s line on sensitive human-rights issues, while Congress has passed legislation banning the app from government devices.

As lawmakers on both sides of the aisle increase their scrutiny of the app, the RESTRICT ACT — which is led by Senators Mark Warner and John Thune­­ — has earned bipartisan support, and some reports have cast it as a TikTok-ban bill.

But unlike other legislation under consideration, such as a Republican proposal that passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee this month, the RESTRICT Act would not outright ban TikTok.

Instead, it would create a framework to mitigate the risk posed by foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries. In its current form, it would do this by codifying a Trump-era executive order that created a process through which the Commerce Department could step in to curtail the use of malign technologies.

“Instead of playing whack-a-mole — Huawei one day, ZTE the next, Kaspersky, TikTok — we need a more comprehensive approach to evaluating and mitigating these threats posed by these foreign technologies from these adversarial nations,” said Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and has said, in headline-grabbing comments, that President Trump was right to sound the alarm about TikTok.

The bill’s supporters are hoping to enshrine that “approach” into law, and, further, to grant the secretary of Commerce new, wide-ranging statutory authorities to move against, and even ban, technologies that pose a national-security threat, while protecting the use of those authorities from litigation that blocked previous regulatory moves against TikTok and other Chinese firms.

The White House supports the RESTRICT Act, too. In a statement issued just after the bill’s introduction, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan hailed the bill, saying it “would provide the U.S. government with new mechanisms to mitigate the national security risks posed by high-risk technology businesses operating in the United States.” But Sullivan did not mention TikTok in his statement, feeding into concerns held by some officials and experts that the bill won’t make a ban more likely.

Marco Rubio, who has frequently partnered with Warner on a number of issues in his capacity as the Intelligence Committee’s vice chair, warned last week that the RESTRICT Act was “not a TikTok bill,” and that it “gives [the White House] the ability to say, ‘Congress passed something, and it’s bipartisan,’ and it gives the illusion of action, but it’s not action.” Rubio, in tandem with Senator Angus King of Maine, is pushing his own legislation that would force a ban of TikTok.

Rubio also noted recent comments by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who told Bloomberg that a law banning TikTok “is not the way to deal with this issue” and added that, “You’re gonna literally lose every voter under 35, forever” by passing a ban.

While the Biden administration has expressed concern about TikTok’s threat to national security, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said that officials are waiting for the conclusion of an ongoing review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), which will eventually deliver a long-delayed ruling on TikTok’s ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance.

That, combined with the White House’s cultivation of TikTok influencers to carry its message to younger audiences, has not inspired confidence among some China hawks.

The American Foreign Policy Council’s Michael Sobolik told National Review that under his reading of the RESTRICT Act, the Commerce Department would still have “the flexibility to defer to the ongoing — and stuck — CFIUS review, and take no action against TikTok.”

“There is a trust deficit between China hawks on the Hill and officials in the administration,” Sobolik said. “Whatever path Congress takes, policymakers cannot miss the big picture: TikTok needs to be banned or severed from CCP control — immediately.”

An additional fear expressed by critics is that the bill could pave the way for the administration to defer to CFIUS if the Committee approves a solution akin to TikTok’s “Project Texas” — a plan that would purportedly prevent foreign breaches of American TikTok users’ data by keeping it on servers in the U.S., and that has aroused skepticism among the app’s opponents.

A Warner aide told National Review, however, that “there’s real agreement across these bills that a Project Texas approach is wholly insufficient.”