The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a notice asking if any companies that benefited from the Section 301 tariffs would like those tariffs continue. If no company benefited, the tariffs would end July 6, said the agency. If requests for continuation are submitted, the USTR will review the tariffs. During that review, opponents to the tariffs will also have the opportunity to be heard, it said. Another notice will be posted after July 6, the four-year anniversary of the tariffs on Chinese imports.
A third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate asked President Joe Biden to expedite an investigation into antidumping and countervailing duty circumvention by solar panel manufacturers in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, if they use Chinese components. The letter, made public on May 2, was led by Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who made the same arguments to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo when she appeared before the Commerce Committee (see 2204270041).
Florida's two U.S. senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, introduced a bill that would require publicly traded companies to report any transactions with Chinese companies on the entity list or that are designated as military-industrial complex companies, and report their sourcing and due diligence activities for supply chains if their imported products have been "directly linked to products utilizing forced labor from Xinjiang, China." The senators, both Republican, announced the bill April 29, and said they have four other Republican co-sponsors.
More than 200 companies, along with local and national trade groups are asking congressional leaders to make sure that the renewal of the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill reimburses importers for tariffs paid on MTB products back to Jan. 1, 2021.
The top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, who will be one of the negotiators for the compromise China package, expressed pessimism that a version of the bill can be found that can get a majority vote in both the House and Senate. The Senate passed its version, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, with 67 votes; the House version, known as the Competes Act, only had one Republican on board.
House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would also be open to lowering or lifting tariffs on at least some Ukrainian goods, he said during a hallway interview at the Capitol on April 28. Neal said he had just left a meeting with the president of Georgia, and she had told him the U.S. support for Ukraine needed to last. The U.K. has lifted tariffs on all Ukrainian imports, and the EU's parliament is considering doing the same.
Two Republicans and a Democrat introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would make all goods produced in either Latin America or the Caribbean duty free for 15 years, if that company was selected for a government-backed low-interest loan to move production from China to the new country. The bill, called the Western Hemisphere Nearshoring Act, was introduced April 26 by Reps. Mark Green, R-Tenn., Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-W.Va., and Albio Sires, D-N.J.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., asked the chairman of the board of Volkswagen to justify joint ventures with Chinese companies, arguing that they are involved in child forced labor in Congolese cobalt mines, and the destruction of rainforest habitat in Indonesia. He also referred to a two-year-old non-governmental organization's report that said Highbroad Advanced Material Co. accepts transferred Uyghur labor, and that the company sells to Volkswagen for its electronic displays, and said that the two companies that are now in joint ventures are also implicated in Uyghur forced labor. He said Huayou Cobalt and Tsingshan Holding Group "are implicated in grotesque human rights abuses." Rubio announced the letter on April 28 in a press release.
Among the 28 motions to instruct for negotiations that will be considered next Tuesday and Wednesday in the Senate, five would affect trade, including one that supports the establishment of an inspector general for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
A bill that establishes a working group to report on how the supply of palladium, neon gas, helium and hexafluorobutadiene 20 were disrupted by the war in Ukraine passed the House of Representatives 414-9 on April 27. The bipartisan bill, introduced by Reps. Peter Meijer, R-Mich., Dina Titus, D-Nev., and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., is called the Protecting Semiconductor Supply Chain Materials from Authoritarians Act.