Because we apparently have too many agencies involved in export control, the answer to this problem is, somewhat surprisingly, yet another export agency. Today the White House issued an order establishing the Export Enforcement Coordination Center within the Department of Homeland Security. The order requires the EECC to “coordinate” among State, Commerce, Treasury, DOJ, Defense, Homeland Security, Energy and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The coordination mandate described by the Order requires the EECC

[to] serve as the primary forum within the Federal Government for executive departments and agencies to coordinate and enhance their export control enforcement efforts and identify and resolve conflicts that have not been otherwise resolved in criminal and administrative investigations and actions involving violations of U.S. export control laws.

Of course, to make sure that no agency gets its nose bent out of shape by the EECC, the order underlines that

[n]othing in this order shall be construed to provide exclusive or primary investigative authority to any agency. Agencies shall continue to investigate criminal and administrative export violations consistent with their existing authorities

In other words, the EECC will hold monthly meetings where, over coffee and bagels, each agency will tell war stories and boast of its enforcement prowess. I’m probably not alone in thinking that this time and money might be better spent in industry education and outreach efforts.

One of the stated goals of export control reform is to unify the export licensing systems used by the Treasury, Commerce and State Departments. Each system — except, of course, for Treasury’s dead-tree system — has it advocates with some rooting for D-Trade, the system used by State, and others rooting for SNAP-R, the Commerce System, to prevail in this war of the Titans. In fact, the winning licensing system will not be any of these but is instead an electronic licensing system that likely is completely unfamiliar to 99.9 percent of exporters.

In the recently posted minutes of the July plenary session of the Defense Trade Advisory Group, Brian Nilsson, a member of the White House’s export control reform task force from the National Security Council, revealed the winner to the audience at DTAG. It is … (drum roll, please) … USXPORTS. Say what? USXwhat?

USXPORTS is a system developed by the DoD in 2003 to assist DOD’s internal processing of its review of export license requests at State and Commerce. Part of the goal of USXport was to enable DoD to receive electronic export application forms from State and Commerce, rather than requiring them to roll up paper copies and shoot them through pneumatic tubes to the Pentagon.

Forgive me for being cynical, but this doesn’t strike me as good news. If I were to select a government agency to develop a user-friendly electronic licensing interface, the Pentagon would be at the very bottom of my list. “User-friendly” and “Pentagon” go together about as well as “military” and “music” or “military” and “justice.” Expect something ugly, confusing, clunky and bureaucratic that requires a user to memorize military acronyms, numeric codes, and service jargon. Get used to the 24-hour clock and the military alphabet now before it is too late.