On May 8, 2025, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which leads the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), announced plans to establish a fast-track process for foreign investors, including a new "Known Investor" Portal for CFIUS filings. For now, the portal will be developed as a pilot program.
The announcement of the pilot program follows the release of President Trump's American First Investment Policy National Security Memorandum earlier this year. In that memorandum, the president announced a policy vision of facilitating greater investment from allied and partner sources, as well as directing additional administrative resources toward facilitating these investments. Moreover, in public remarks last month, Treasury Deputy Secretary Michael Faulkender highlighted the administration's desire to collect information from foreign investors earlier in the process and limit the amount of information that must be resubmitted with each new filing for proven foreign investors.
In practice, the pilot will allow investors to submit information in advance of a specific filing, with an apparent goal of the Treasury Department eventually building a database of investor information, particularly for repeat foreign investors who have a "verifiable distance and independence from foreign adversaries or threat actors." Once developed, the pilot program should reduce the burden of resubmitting investor details for each filing. This will likely be of greatest benefit to larger institutional investors from allied nations that have a history of CFIUS-cleared deals.
Currently, the CFIUS regulations have no investor-based "fast track" procedure, although they do except from CFIUS review certain investments from a short whitelist of foreign states, specifically, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
In his April remarks, Deputy Secretary Faulkender stressed that any new efficiencies in the CFIUS process will not diminish the Committee's abilities to assess any security risks arising from each unique transaction. Transaction-by-transaction review by CFIUS is required under Section 721 of the Defense Production Act, as amended, and CFIUS's implementing regulations.
