Second, Treasury’s Known Investor Program may become relevant for repeat investors from allied and partner countries. Treasury announced a pilot in 2025 involving a limited number of investors and in February 2026 sought public input on the development of the broader program. The concept is to collect information from eligible foreign investors in advance of a transaction filing so that CFIUS can seek process efficiencies while preserving its national security review. For repeat investors, the relevant question is whether advance familiarity with an investor produces measurable improvements in case processing when the program is more broadly implemented. It is important, however, not to confuse procedural efficiency with substantive preferential treatment. Treasury has expressly stated that neither the Known Investor Program nor its pilot changes the Committee’s jurisdiction or the statutory review process. Third, CFIUS is building additional technical and process infrastructure. The Annual Report identifies Treasury’s establishment of an Office of Research and Analysis in 2025, an in-house technical branch staffed by scientists, engineers, and data subject-matter experts. Treasury’s new CFIUS website, launched in 2026, also includes a Risk Matrix intended to help parties understand the types of threat, vulnerability and consequence
considerations relevant to CFIUS analysis, as well as a mechanism for requesting pre-filing consultations. Whether these initiatives produce a more technically informed and predictable review process remains to be seen. For transaction parties, the central lesson from the 2025 data is therefore not a prediction about whether CFIUS will be “harder” or “easier” in the next case. It is that aggregate filing statistics answer relatively few of the questions that determine transaction outcomes. The questions that matter are transaction-specific: What will CFIUS care about? Which filing route best fits the transaction? Should the parties seek safe harbor at all? If CFIUS identifies a concern, can it be resolved on terms that preserve the deal? How much timing uncertainty can the transaction absorb? And, for parties already operating under mitigation, do restrictions imposed years ago still need to remain in their current form? To discuss how these questions may be answered for your transaction or mitigation agreement, or for other CFIUS and related regulatory questions more broadly, please reach out to our team. We guide clients through this complex landscape, from initial risk assessment and filing strategy through mitigation negotiation and compliance implementation, maximizing transaction certainty and minimizing regulatory burden.
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