Mara Lee

All of the Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, except ranking member Richard Neal of Massachusetts, signed a Feb. 22 letter asking the chairman of the Trade Subcommittee to hold a hearing on NAFTA. The group says a hearing is necessary so that Congress can provide appropriate oversight of the U.S. trade representative's negotiations for a revised NAFTA. "More than 25 years ago, this Committee held the administrations negotiating the original NAFTA to a high standard of accountability, requiring United States Trade Representatives, Secretaries of Labor, and Administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency to appear before it multiple times," the lawmakers said. "American workers, businesses, and other stakeholders of today deserve as much accountability, if not more, from their negotiators and from their representatives."

With less than a week before the seventh round of NAFTA talks begin, top Mexican officials are talking about working with the country's auto industry to shape a proposal on auto rules of origin. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has suggested that vehicles contain 85 percent North American content to qualify as duty free, and that half of the content come from the United States (see 1712120022). Detroit automakers have said that would be massively disruptive and make cars more expensive.

Steel industry interests testified Feb. 16 that duty evasion is pervasive, and that customs enforcement cannot keep up. "Customs and duty evasion and circumvention occurs because there's opportunity and because there's lack of enforcement," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. "Our border protections with regards to fairly traded goods are underfunded."

Worldwide tariffs on steel and aluminum or worldwide quotas on imports of those metals are two of the Commerce Department’s three recommendations on how to respond to plant closures and job losses in the domestic steel and aluminum industries. A flood of steel and aluminum, dumped at prices that undermine U.S. producers, is threatening the industrial base, and therefore national security, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told the White House in January. On Feb. 16, he shared the details of those reports with reporters on a conference call, and posted redacted versions of both reports on the department’s website.

The Trump administration floated a reduction to the Harbor Maintenance Tax in its recently released budget proposals. The administration called for collecting $300 million less per year in HMT because more money has been collected than is spent on harbor upkeep in recent years. The budget proposal says that if the lower level of harbor maintenance tax is collected, it "would provide greater flexibility for individual ports to establish appropriate fee structures for services they provide, in order to help finance their capital and operating expenses on their own."

A bill that would retroactively renew the Generalized System of Preferences, and extend the program for developing countries until the end of 2020, passed the House of Representatives Feb. 13 by a nearly unanimous vote -- 400-2 in favor. A companion bill has not yet been introduced in the Senate.

A bill that would create a Commerce Department task force focused on potential self-initiated antidumping and countervailing duty investigations was to be introduced Feb. 14, Senators Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., announced. The International Trade Administration task force would investigate imports that could be subject to AD/CV duties and refer abuses for formal investigation. The bill instructs the task force to place its emphasis on small and medium domestic producers that are being undercut by unfair imports.

President Donald Trump told 15 congressional Republicans and four Democrats visiting the White House Feb. 13 that he's considering quotas or tariffs to protect domestic steel and aluminum. Producers have been decimated by dumping from China and other countries, he said. He said he'd discussed "in great detail" on the campaign trail how U.S. steel and aluminum industries have been taken advantage of by other countries.

Ripping up NAFTA was one of President Donald Trump's biggest applause lines at his campaign rallies, and it's hard to see him walking away from that, given its importance "for the people he feeds off," said Grant Aldonas, a Commerce Department undersecretary for international trade during the George W. Bush administration, speaking Feb. 13 at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones conference. He encouraged attendees to lobby Congress to modernize and preserve NAFTA, but he noted that their arguments have to take into account the power of populism and the uncertain political environment as midterm elections approach. "You can see that [uncertainty] in retirements, especially on the Republican side," he said. "People are dealing with politics they don't recognize."

The Trump administration's budget request for fiscal year 2019 keeps funding for the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration largely flat. Still, that funding "would allow ITA to conduct robust investigations into al­leged trade violations, aggressively advocate for U.S. businesses facing tariff and non-tariff barriers abroad, and increase the capacity to closely review proposed foreign investments in U.S. businesses." The request, released Feb. 12, said "the President insisted on a simple, but forgotten principle -- America First," and said that trade enforcement is a high-priority, mission-critical program.