U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai asked for consultations with Mexico over a 2021 amendment to Mexico's Electric Power Industry Law that privileges the state-owned electric utility, and over 2019 and June 2022 actions that privilege PEMEX, Mexico's state-owned oil and gas company.
Although climate advocate Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has hopes of introducing a bipartisan carbon border adjustment tax, he said it may take American exports being hit with carbon border tariffs in Europe to get Congress to move.
Saying tariffs on Canadian lumber are adding to home building costs, Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and John Thune, R-S.D., asked Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to expedite the final determination on Canadian softwood lumber trade remedies.
Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said USMCA is crucial to the country's economic recovery from the pandemic "because it was developed with the future in mind."
Congress is abandoning its effort to compromise on its two China packages as the Senate moves to pass a pared-down bill that will provide financial incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. What exactly is in the bill isn't yet known, but none of the trade title is expected to survive.
The Entity List released last month for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) will be getting longer fairly soon, according to John Pickel, principal director, trade and economic competitiveness, Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans at DHS. Pickel, speaking at a CBP trade conference in California July 18, sad, "The process for adding and removing entities will be summarized in a Federal Register notice that we expect to come out in the short term."
As China has used economic coercion to punish countries such as Lithuania and Australia, senators are suggesting that the president could lower tariffs or quotas on countries' exports to the U.S. to ease the pain. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced a bill that would give the president the authority to lower tariffs or modify quotas on imports from a country that is facing economic coercion to make up for lost exports, and to waive some policy requirements to facilitate export financing. Congress would have to be consulted on whether there is economic coercion and how to support the target of that coercion. The support would sunset after two years.
The head of the Bureau of Industry and Security told senators that the agency expects to put out a rule by the end of the year adjusting how Section 232 exclusions are granted.
The high price of fertilizers is a bigger emergency than the cost of solar panels, argued Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and six other Republican senators and U.S. Representative Tracey Mann, R-Kan., and 23 other Republican House members in a letter asking President Joe Biden to intervene in antidumping and countervailing duty cases on phosphate fertilizer from Morocco and a preliminary decision on a trade remedy case on urea ammonium nitrate fertilizer from Trinidad and Tobago.
The House of Representatives voted 421-2 to remove tariffs on imported formula through the end of the year, just over three weeks since a bill was introduced by Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., to pause the tariffs.