U.S. Senator Rick Scott announced two bills on October 1 that would create new securities-market consequences for companies appearing on federal Chinese military-company lists. The measures have been introduced but have not been enacted, and neither proposal is current Securities and Exchange Commission policy.
The Know Your Sanctioned Securities Act would direct the SEC to add “CMC” to the ticker symbol of securities issued by any company designated on the list maintained under Section 1260H of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. The legislative text also directs the SEC to remove the modifier when an issuer is removed from that list.
The Protecting U.S. Investors From Chinese Military Companies Act would require the SEC to indefinitely suspend trading in the securities of a company that remains on the Section 1260H list through two consecutive annual revisions. Its text provides a separate procedure for a covered company added to Treasury’s Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List: the SEC would notify specified congressional committees that it did not suspend trading because the company is on the Treasury list.
The second bill also limits the SEC’s implementing authority. The commission could issue regulations and orders needed to identify affected securities, administer the trading prohibition, apply the exception and make the required notices, but could not create designation criteria or extend the prohibition beyond the statute.
Introduced legislation, not market policy
Scott’s office describes the bills as measures to protect U.S. investors and prevent American capital from financing companies connected to China’s military. Those are the sponsor’s policy claims. The official materials do not establish how many securities would receive the proposed modifier, how many companies would meet the two-year suspension test, or what market effects the proposals would have.
The sponsor’s press release says the Coalition for a Prosperous America and the American Securities Association endorsed the bills. Those endorsements are advocacy positions rather than independent evaluations.
The two linked legislative texts are Senate Legislative Counsel drafts and do not display assigned bill numbers in the copies published by Scott’s office. That administrative gap does not change what the texts propose, but it means readers should track any later Congress.gov filings for formal bill numbers, committee referrals and amendments.
Free China Movement assessment: Linking capital-market consequences to existing designation lists would shift those lists from disclosure and sanctions architecture toward direct exchange-level effects. Any evaluation should distinguish the threshold for designation from the separate threshold for a trading suspension and should test whether notice, review and delisting procedures are sufficiently transparent.