This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 15th, 2019 and Caleb Brown.

The President has relaxed restrictions on U.S. companies doing business with

Huawei, the massive Chinese firm, but many members of Congress

believe the firm poses a real and substantial national security risk.

Cato's Dan Eikensen says that if we're going to break the important supply chains that U.S. firms have with

Huawei, we should have a public accounting of the risk the company poses.

What role does Huawei play in the supply chains for electronics?

Huawei is the second largest producer of handsets in the world.

It has a huge global market its market in the United States is

relatively small it's had difficulties penetrating the US market because of

innuendo and threats and you know Huawei has been in the crosshairs of

U.S. policymakers particularly in the national security community since about

2007 when it attempted to purchase a software company called 3Com,

Huawei was brought to the attention of Ciphyus, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United

States, and identified as a possible national security threat because of ties between

its founder and president and the People's Liberation Army.

And you know there were hearings about Huawei subsequent to that in like 2012 where

Huawei and ZTE, if we recall that other Chinese ICT company, were identified as threats threats but all of the information upon which

those conclusions were based remains classified and so that's raised some

suspicions that perhaps these companies and particularly

Huawei got into the crosshairs of US policy makers because it was the most

obvious beneficiary of years of Chinese industrial policy and US policymakers were

...