WH Opposition to AGOA Prevented AGOA, GSP Renewal in Tax Bill
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, wanted to include trade items in the bill that extends and expands Trump income tax cuts, according to a lobbyist on trade matters.
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"They wanted to do trade," he said. It was going to include a renewal of the long-expired Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, and "Haiti may have also been in play."
The lobbyist added, "depending on who you talk to," Crapo also wanted to pass a Miscellaneous Tariff Bill. The Haitian trade preference programs and AGOA expire at the end of September; the last MTB and GSP both expired at the end of 2020.
"From my understanding, and this is from both industry and congressional sources, all the [White House] pushback was actually on AGOA," he said, but that prevented any trade items from being included.
The development was first reported by Inside U.S. Trade.
The lobbyist said when they talk to those in the administration, "We don’t get anything on GSP, thumbs up or thumbs down, there’s no position."
He said he tells members of Congress that during the first Trump administration, there was also no signal for or against GSP before it expired at the end of 2017, but then after it was gone, the Trump administration endorsed it. That time, it was renewed in March 2018. The MTB followed in September that year.
Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, a member of the House Republican leadership and a Ways and Means Committee member, is the most vocal GSP advocate in Congress. "I was also a supporter of putting GSP into anything it could," he said, but the bill "wasn't really part of our substantive discussions" as Ways and Means built its portion of the tax bill.
Moore said he does talk to those at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative about the need to bring GSP back, especially as the tariff policies change.
"You're hard on China. We've got to be able to encourage folks to be able to embrace other markets" as places to source goods. "As the strongest supporter of GSP, I hope the administration understands that," Moore said in a hallway interview June 24. He said the official he talked to at USTR was "generally supportive," but Moore said that it's really Congress's responsibility to pass a bill. He said "if Congress can figure this out," he assumes Trump would sign the bill.
"If we can't put it up, we don't have a leg to stand on. He wasn't dismissive of it, but he wasn't like, 'Okay, I'll prepare the President to sign it.'"
The lobbyist said even though GSP has been expired for the longest period in its 50-year history, he thinks it is not gone for good.
"I think it's a question of how many issues need to stack up here for anything to move," he said. He said he doesn't know if Democrats would support a GSP-AGOA-Haiti trade preferences package if trade adjustment assistance is not part of the deal.