Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Jewish Insider last week that he’s likely to support the administration’s proposed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which would reportedly allow for joint U.S.-Saudi nuclear enrichment efforts inside Saudi Arabia.

Mast’s support, as the chair of a committee that will be responsible for reviewing the deal during a mandatory congressional oversight period, is a strong sign that many congressional Republicans coalesce behind the administration in support of the agreement. Democrats have voiced concerns, particularly related to potential nuclear proliferation.

Mast told JI that he would “likely” support the deal, adding, “There’s still details that are being ironed out, but I’m pretty supportive of the agreement. … There’s always small details of things that you have to work out, but from everything that I’m noticed on, I’m supportive.”

Mast said he had reviewed notifications to Congress about the deal, been briefed in private and had spoken directly to Energy Secretary Chris Wright about the agreement and discussed it extensively with the administration. 

According to a letter submitted by President Donald Trump to Congress about the deal, the agreement would “permit the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology to support a joint enrichment and conversion study … but would not permit the transfer of restricted data,” consistent with public reports that the deal would allow for some nuclear enrichment inside Saudi Arabia at a so-called black box facility to be managed by the U.S.

Trump, in the letter, stated that the deal “will promote, and will not constitute an unreasonable risk to the common defense and security” and “will advance the nonproliferation and other foreign policy interests of the United States of America.”

In an analysis shared Wednesday, the Institute for Science and International Security think tank said the deal appears “deliberately structured so that a U.S. designed, built, and operated enrichment facility can be deployed in Saudi Arabia without automatically transferring the centrifuge technology embodied in that facility,” so the U.S. could “retain control of centrifuge design, production, assembly, maintenance, and physical access.”

But the deal also includes a “potential loophole” that “explicitly permits transfers of centrifuge sensitive nuclear technology (SNT) under certain circumstances” and is therefore “not a categorical prohibition on ever transferring or teaching information on enrichment facilities,” and does not address whether Saudi Arabia could separately pursue its own enrichment efforts.

The institute, while calling the “black box” concept “attractive,” said that actually establishing the enrichment facility would require additional agreements, and said that there are still questions to be answered about “the extent of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in building, maintaining, and operating the enrichment facility and the risk of proliferation.”

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a senior member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, praised the deal in an interview with JI last week as a path to allow Saudi Arabia, other allies and potentially someday a peaceful Iran to move toward nuclear energy for domestic purposes. He emphasized that Riyadh would not “have to manage it” under the deal “but they could own it.”

“I think they’re one of the good ones where they’re not asking to have control necessarily,” he said.

Asked about the potential for enrichment on Saudi soil and the fact that the deal does not contain the same level of safeguards applied in the U.S. nuclear cooperation deal with the United Arab Emirates, which does preclude enrichment, Issa suggested that it was an issue of “national pride” that Saudi Arabia did not want to be “precluded in some sort of agreement.”

He suggested that enrichment inside Saudi Arabia would be a long way off, in a time when regional normalization with Israel is “taken for granted,” and praised Saudi Arabia as an “open book” that “seem[s] to be very open to concessions that may be asked for by the administration.”

He also argued that there are both safety and energy reasons to work toward domestic reprocessing of nuclear fuel.

“Being able to get more use out of one round is in everyone’s best interest,” he said. “In the future, safeguards that allow for regional reprocessing make sense. You really don’t want to move these spent rods any further than necessary to be able to reuse the energy.”

Issa additionally emphasized that there are no energy-related reasons to enrich uranium to the levels that Iran has, but that expanded nuclear power in the Middle East would be a positive step for the region and for the world.

Other House Republicans on the Foreign Affairs Committee said they hadn’t yet had the opportunity to review the deal as of late last week.