How Congress Competes: Lessons From Inside the House Select Committee on the CCP

Hello, I’m Ylli Bajraktari, President of the Special Competitive Studies Project. In this edition of our newsletter, Lara Jolicoeur shares an inside account of her time on the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, where she served on the Investigations and Oversight team from June 2025 to March 2026. Drawing on that experience, she examines how a committee with no legislative jurisdiction of its own still shapes U.S.-China strategy — and what its investigations, bipartisan record, and limits reveal about American competitiveness.

America’s competition with the Chinese Communist Party will not be won by the executive branch alone — but what Congress actually contributes to that competition is poorly understood, including by many in the policy community. From June 2025 to March 2026, I served as an SCSP National Security Technology Fellow on the Investigations and Oversight team of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. What follows, shared with the Committee’s approval, is an account of how a congressional body with no traditional legislative jurisdiction fits into U.S.-China strategy — what its tools can do, where their limits lie, and what the experience suggests about the state of America’s response.

The Select Committee was established in 2023 by a 365–65 House vote to examine the geopolitical, economic, technological, and national security dimensions of the U.S.-China competition. It is currently led by Chairman John Moolenaar (MI-02) and Ranking Member Ro Khanna (CA-17), and it operates as a bipartisan body. The Committee, however, has no original legislation jurisdiction – meaning the Committee members can write and introduce legislation but they cannot move the legislation through the Committee on its own. Rather, it must rely on the Committee with the appropriate subject matter oversight. Its influence runs through other channels: surfacing risks, gathering information, and shaping the policy agenda of the committees and agencies that can act.

Investigation is its primary instrument. In emerging and strategically significant domains — advanced technology, investment flows, research security, critical infrastructure — regulatory frameworks lag both innovation and adversary behavior. The Committee’s investigations identify vulnerabilities across supply chains, research ecosystems, and capital markets before they become deeply embedded, then convert those findings into recommendations for others to carry forward. Oversight is the complement: examining whether American companies and institutions are inadvertently underwriting activities that erode U.S. security or competitiveness, with subpoena power as the lever when voluntary cooperation falls short. During my fellowship, I investigated how the CCP exploits openings in trade, technology, and international institutions to extend its influence — work spanning technology, finance, industrial policy, higher education, and global governance.

The honest caveat is that this model’s output is only as good as its uptake. A committee that recommends but cannot legislate depends on executive agencies, standing committees, and private institutions to act on what it surfaces — and they do not always act, or act quickly. Investigations generate pressure and information; they do not by themselves close vulnerabilities. Anyone assessing the Committee’s value should hold both facts at once: its investigative record has moved real policy conversations, and the gap between what it identifies and what the broader system fixes remains wide.

One principle in its work deserves wider adoption across China policy: the Committee directs its scrutiny at the policies and actions of the Chinese government and the CCP, never at the Chinese people. That distinction was made concrete through engagement with Uyghur and Hong Kong democracy activists and victims of transnational repression, whose testimony kept the human stakes of authoritarian rule in view. This competition is not solely about economics, military power, or technological leadership; it is also a contest over values and institutional integrity — and precision about the adversary is part of competing well.

I did not arrive at the Committee needing to be convinced of those stakes – I had already seen them up close. My grandmother’s family fled Shanghai just before the Communist takeover in 1949; the relatives who stayed paid for their capitalist background and Kuomintang ties with imprisonment, public humiliation, and forced labor reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. Years later, living in China as a student, I watched police arrest a woman for peacefully practicing a Buddhist ritual in a public park while everyone around her — myself included — averted their eyes. That is what governance looks like when a state treats its own people as a problem to be monitored, managed, and controlled.

The Capitol offers a daily counterpoint — lobbyists, advocates, constituents, and officials pressing their cases through the same institutional channels. It is slower, noisier, and messier than the CCP’s model. It is also accountable in ways that in model cannot be, and the difference is worth defending even when the machinery frustrates.

Three observations stood out from the Committee:

First, the bipartisan foundation has held. So far, members of both parties collaborate on joint investigations, hearings, and legislation, sustaining a shared view that the China challenge reaches beyond traditional national security into innovation, education, economic resilience, and industrial competitiveness. But, in my time, bipartisanship on diagnosis did not always translate into bipartisanship on legislative remedies, where costs get allocated and consensus thins. The Committee’s cohesion is an asset precisely because it is unusual, and it should not be assumed permanent.

Second, the policy community increasingly treats competitiveness and security as one project. There is growing recognition that America’s capacity to innovate and hold technological leadership underpins its long-term security, and that meeting the China challenge means investing in domestic strength, not only mitigating external threats. The recognition, however, seemed to be running ahead of the resourcing. From where I sat, the diagnosis was outpacing the investment, and the distance looked like where this competition will be decided.

Third, the private sector has grown more clear-eyed, though unevenly. After decades of treating the PRC chiefly as a market opportunity, many business leaders now weigh supply chain dependencies, intellectual property theft, and economic coercion alongside commercial upside. But exposure still seemed to shape appetite: firms with revenue at stake in China continue to face real tension between commercial interest and national security concern, and voluntary cooperation with congressional scrutiny often reflects that tension. The Committee’s subpoena power exists because goodwill alone does not suffice.

The fellowship sharpened the strategic context I bring back to SCSP’s technology portfolio. China’s push in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies is not a purely technical story; it is an extension of the same long-term bid for global influence that runs through its economic statecraft, military modernization, and campaign to reshape international norms and institutions. Analyzing China’s AI development without that context misses what the technology is for.

The larger lesson is about how democratic systems actually compete: incrementally, through the accumulation of surfaced risks, informed policymakers, and institutions held to account. No single report or hearing dismantles authoritarian influence, and no one working in Congress believes otherwise. But the cumulative work compounds when government, industry, and civil society reinforce one another — and it stalls when any of the three assumes the others have it handled. For those weighing a career in public service, that is the realistic pitch: the tools are real, the progress is incremental, and the work depends on people willing to do it anyway.