Inside the congressional Foreign Arms Sales Task Force’s effort to spearhead reform

The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced six legislative proposals this week that would codify reforms to the U.S. government’s procedures for selling or transferring weapons and other defense assets to allies and international partners.

Introduced by members of the committee’s bipartisan Foreign Arms Sales Task Force set up to investigate and help resolve existing acquisition hurdles, the six bills include provisions to incentivize domestic capabilities and munitions manufacturing, and expand other nations’ options to adopt American-made defense articles.

“We have to make sure the process that’s put in place is effective, it has the right level of accountability and that it delivers,” the task force’s chairman, Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., told DefenseScoop in an interview on Wednesday.

Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) refer to two methods the U.S. applies to sell and provide equipment, technology and services to other nations. FMS is a government-to-government process where the U.S. serves as an intermediary between a foreign country and a U.S. defense contractor, while DCS involves direct contracts between other nations and American vendors, with the U.S. government overseeing export controls and licensing. 

In the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and separate conflicts in the Middle East that emerged after Iran-backed Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, countries’ interest in buying U.S. weapons has grown substantially. 

According to data from the State Department, the U.S. transferred assets with a total value of $117.9 billion via the FMS system in fiscal 2024, which represented a 45.7% boost from the previous fiscal year — and at the time marked the highest-ever amount of sales and assistance America provided to foreign nations in the span of one year.

However, experts have raised increasing concerns in recent years about bureaucratic and modernization issues that increasingly plague these procurement processes, like lengthy requirements leading to delivery delays, complexities that result in a lack of oversight and transparency, and other obstacles that ultimately impact U.S. competitiveness.

“Unfortunately, what’s happening now is that our allies — we expect them to fight with us. And what happens is they pay for weapon systems upfront, but by the time that they get them, the weapon systems are going to be obsolete in many cases, because the battlefield is changing so rapidly. Particularly with [unmanned aerial vehicles] and autonomous weaponry and missile systems, by the time we get the equipment to them, it’s oftentimes obsolete,” Zinke said.

The U.S. industrial base for military hardware depends heavily on foreign military sales, he noted.

In April, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the government to essentially overhaul its current approach to transferring defense software and hardware. 

A few weeks before that, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., launched the FMS Task Force and named Zinke and Ranking Member Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Penn., to lead it.

To shape the creation of their six new proposals, the task force heard from international partners, defense industry stakeholders, and U.S. government officials from multiple agencies to gain feedback on where there are needs for reform.

The overarching vision, Zinke said, was for the “working group to actually address how to restructure foreign military sales so it meets [the president’s] goals.”

According to a fact sheet viewed by DefenseScoop, the six task force-led measures that moved forward in Tuesday’s markup include: 

• Streamlining Foreign Military Sales Act — introduced by Zinke, and Rep. James Panetta, D-Calif.; would raise the Congressional Notification value thresholds to levels requested by the Trump Administration’s April mandate
• AUKUS Reform for Military Optimization and Review (ARMOR) Act — introduced by Dean and Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif.; seeks to “address a variety of impediments” to trilateral security partnership’s Pillar II implementation 
• ITAR Licensing Reform Act — introduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash.; would codify the prioritization requirement in Trump’s directive by requiring the State Department to establish a list of priority partners and end users for DCS and creating a time-bound process for issuing such licenses. 
• Made-In-America Defense Act — introduced by Rep. Sheri Biggs, R-S.C.; would codify the FMS-only list review requirement in Trump’s order and direct the Departments of State and Defense to conduct an annual review of that list
• Missile Technology Control Review Act — introduced by Reps. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and Michael McCaul, R-Texas; would amend the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 to allow for expedited defense trade with nations that the president determines to be eligible for an exemption
• Abraham Accords Defense Against Terror Act — introduced by Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; would reduce bureaucratic hurdles for regional partners that commit to fighting the threat posed by Iran and its proxies by creating an expedited formal review process for defense sales to these partners

When asked if he’s confident all of the proposals will pass through the full Senate, Zinke said “I think they’re necessary.”

He added that the task force has also been working closely with federal departments and human rights organizations to confront the potential for misuse, as the current process has been criticized for being difficult to monitor U.S. military equipment and associated civilian casualties.

“I think you need to make sure you have the authorities in place to do it. That means the decision process has to take in consideration things like the Leahy Act, child trafficking and child soldiers. There’s a lot of things in law that need to be, on a sale, absolutely adhered to,” Zinke told DefenseScoop.

After serving as a Navy SEAL from 1986 to 2008, he went on to become the first-ever SEAL elected to the House of Representatives — and the first to occupy a position in the Cabinet, when he was tapped as secretary of interior during the first Trump administration.

Drawing from his experiences as a Naval Special Warfare Officer, the congressman said he understands “how important currency is on the battlefield, and the currency is the best technology, because sometimes six months makes a difference.”

“What I saw [as a SEAL] was a system that was multiple departments with different objectives, unable to communicate with each other. That resulted in our allies paying for equipment upfront, oftentimes receiving obsolete equipment, but that equipment is most assuredly always late. With peacetime, you could take it out of the stockpile, right, because, you’re not shooting that much,” Zinke said, suggesting the U.S. supply chain is not presently equipped for wartime demands.

With that tenure, plus his time as a businessman, Zinke said he felt uniquely positioned to steer the FMS Task Force. He noted he has “excellent relationships” with Trump, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Congress should step up and do our part, making sure that there’s still transparency and oversight, because that’s Article One. And I think we can shake it up a little and present our recommendations to Hegseth and Rubio — which we’re doing — and then pass a series of bills to make sure that we update and get the authorities where necessary in order to, again, deliver on what we’re promising,” Zinke told DefenseScoop.