> there are no checks and balances for this area of government activity

Of course there are. Congress can pass laws limiting executive actions. And the courts can constrain it.

Okay, so in theory maybe there could be checks and balances in place. In practice, however, there are instead secret court orders, subpoenas, or "national security letters".

> there are instead secret court orders, subpoenas, or "national security letters"

None of which apply to this action, which has been publicly promulgated and will be publicly enforced and challenged.

Also, secret courts and NSLs are an abomination. Subpoenas are legal demands for information.

None of which _are known to_ apply to this action. Sure. But it still doesn't change the root of the problem: the alleged security problems with Chinese products, caused by government being able to force manufacturers to do whatever their intelligence agencies require, are in fact real - but for US products, not Chinese ones.

Companies tend to fight back when it's profitable to fight back; and do their best to ignore the government otherwise. See: this week's tech CEO house hearing. I can't recall this example of the backdoors; and if you say "Clipper Chips" I'm going home.

Of course I don't mean clipper. I mean the backdoors in US telco equipment - some uncovered by Snowden, some discovered by independent researchers. If your theory were true, Chinese network equipment would be full of government backdoors, and US manufactured equipment would be free of them. In the real world, however, the reverse is true.