"After Trump's October summit with Xi, the US president told officials to avoid actions that would hurt the truce." [October summit]
This establishes the executive's explicit directive to avoid China restrictions. The article then documents the FCC proceeding with bans on drones, routers, and testing labs despite this directive, proving the regulatory workaround.
Reasoning from this article
The article explicitly contrasts Trump's trade ceasefire directive with the FCC's simultaneous actions: Commerce avoided export controls, Treasury halted sanctions, but the FCC proceeded with bans. The mechanism is institutional—the FCC has statutory authority over radio-frequency devices and a 'covered list' for security threats, giving it legal cover to act independently. This pattern generalizes beyond this moment: when executive-level geopolitical accommodation conflicts with agency-level security mandates, agencies with narrow technical jurisdiction can enforce restrictions the political leadership has deprioritized.