Howard Lutnick Has Got to Go

The argument is that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick should resign because his failure to enforce safeguards on advanced chip exports enabled large-scale transfers to China and exposed weaknesses in U.S. national-security policy. The piece connects that failure to the crisis surrounding Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, who resigned after acknowledging an affair with Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive suspected of links to Chinese intelligence. China denies the espionage allegations. The author says the Biden administration’s 2025 rules would have required licenses for major chip purchases by unvetted firms, but Lutnick’s department declined to implement them and never issued the promised replacement. Instead, it left companies such as Nvidia and server suppliers to judge customers’ risks themselves.

The consequences, the author contends, include billions of dollars in chips allegedly routed through Southeast Asia to China, with Megaspeed suspected of diverting about $7 billion. A separate loophole lets Chinese firms rent computing capacity they cannot legally purchase; Singapore-based DayOne, for example, reportedly earns most of its revenue from ByteDance and is building facilities for more than 1.5 million advanced Nvidia chips. The piece also faults Lutnick for keeping Megaspeed off the Commerce Department’s trade blacklist and describes a deputy’s unusual discussion of the company’s investigation with Nvidia’s counsel before the probe stopped. It calls for Lutnick’s removal, stronger export rules, closure of the rental loophole, passage of three bipartisan chip-control bills, and congressional scrutiny of the department’s handling of the case.