Its deliberations are opaque and its decisions have the power to kill multibillion-dollar international business deals. Its acronym strikes fear into companies and investment bankers. Its day-to-day staff is an earnest and elite band of 16 Ivy League-educated lawyers who labour deep inside the US Treasury, ostensibly to protect America’s economic future. And it is poised to gain a lot more power.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (Cfius) is one of the most powerful — and enigmatic — regulators in the world. An inter-agency committee that brings together defence and intelligence staff with economic policymakers, it was created to vet inbound foreign investment for potential national security threats.

Yet reforms being pushed by President Donald Trump and contained in a bill now working its way through Congress would, if enacted, expand its workload from a few hundred transactions a year to potentially thousands.