By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 11th, 2024
U.S. Budget Chief made the request in a letter to Congress asking for a delay in the implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Trump and which contains provisions that target Huawei.
It seems that The White House’s acting budget chief is trying to push for a delay in implementing key provisions of a law that restricts the U.S. government’s business with Huawei Technologies Co., citing the burdens on U.S. companies that use its technology.
Acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell T. Vought sent a letter to VP Mike Pence and members of Congress requesting a two years delay in the implementation in the implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Trump last year and which contains provisions that target Huawei.
The letter says the provisions in the act would result in a “dramatic reduction” of the number of companies able to supply the government. It says:
“While the Administration recognizes the importance of these prohibitions to national security, a number of agencies have heard significant concerns from a wide range of potentially impacted stakeholders who would be affected.”
Vought reportedly requested a span of four years, rather than two, from the passage of the NDAA before the Chinese company tech is barred from US government usage.
Recently speaking to Reuters, Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, sent some signals about the situation saying:
“I think what the president is saying is, if we move forward on trade, that perhaps he’ll be willing to do certain things on Huawei if he gets comfort from China on that and certain guarantees. But these are national security issues.”
In the meantime, it seems that Huawei is sending developers requests to publish on its app store. The email that developers are getting is sent as an invitation to join AppGallery, an app store that the company says has “270 million monthly active users” on over “350m phones,” about half of which are sold outside of China.
The email promises that developers will be provided with “full support” to help them publish their app on AppGallery, but it’s unclear exactly what kind of support will be provided to developers. Lastly, the email mentions a free invitation to a developer community of over “560k”, though it’s not clear how active this community really is. This, however, is nothing strange, since there were similar requests from Amazon to publish on the Amazon Appstore as well.