Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., introduced a bill that would require CBP to pay interest on distributions of antidumping duties and countervailing duties to injured parties under the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA), for entries that were made before Sept. 30, 2007. According to a press release from Panetta, garlic growers are owed $10.5 million for distributions that were too low between 2000 and 2014. Under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act (TFTEA), interest was paid on distributions of payments made after Oct. 1, 2014, in connection with "a customs bond pursuant to a court order or judgment; or a settlement with respect to a customs bond, including any payment made to U.S. Customs and Border Protection with respect to that bond by a surety."
Senate and House lawmakers reached an agreement on compromise text that merges versions of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act from each chamber, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., tweeted on Dec. 14. "Happy to report that Senator [Marco] Rubio & I just reached an agreement on final text of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act," McGovern said. "We will be moving our bill through both chambers & to President Biden's desk as quickly as possible." The bill would add a rebuttable presumption that goods from the Xinjiang region of China are made with forced labor starting 180 days after enactment.
Senate and House lawmakers reached an agreement on compromise text that merges versions of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act from each chamber, and Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., told International Trade Today on Dec. 14 that he hopes the new bill can pass the House later in the day. It is scheduled for a vote after 6 p.m. McGovern continued to say his version had been stronger than the one written by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., but said he had to consider what could get through the Senate. Rubio's bill passed the Senate under unanimous consent this summer.
Despite repeated lobbying and threats of tariffs on U.S. exports from Canada and Mexico, the Senate Finance Committee is proposing that a purchase credit for electric vehicles remain more generous for union-made, U.S.-assembled cars and trucks through 2026, and be reserved only for U.S.-made vehicles starting in 2027.
Twenty years after China joined the World Trade Organization, the U.S. is focused on the market distortions and domestic consequences caused by China's export-led growth, even as exports are a smaller and smaller proportion of China's GDP.
Canada's finance and trade ministers said that an electric vehicle purchase tax credit that excludes Canadian batteries or Canadian-assembled cars abrogates the USMCA, and they asked senators to write the tax credit differently than the House approach. That House tax credit would only be allowed for American-built cars after 2027, and would be more generous for American-built cars from 2023 to 2026.
The Generalized System of Preferences benefits program has been expired for almost a year, but Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., and Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., are suggesting that reauthorization include changes to how Competitive Need Limitations are calculated so that fewer products are removed from the tariff benefit, and so that products may be more easily restored if the import levels no longer qualify.
How to manage China's market distortions is an ever-present question in the relationship between the U.S. and the EU and will need to be addressed eventually, the deputy director-general of BusinessEurope and the president of the China Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said during a Dec. 9 Chamber event. Luisa Santos, from BusinesEurope, said that she sees new ambitions in Europe to address the disruption caused by non-market economies, including an anti-coercion tool that was just announced. But, she said, there needs to be more work in coordinating with the U.S. and Japan on how to address subsidies, state-owned enterprises and forced technology transfer. "I think one of the most important things to agree on what we think is a distortive subsidy and then the best way to address it," she said.
The House of Representatives on Dec. 8 passed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act 364-60, though the text of the bill changed from its introduction in August. The bill prohibits ocean carriers from unreasonably reducing "shipper accessibility to equipment necessary for the loading or unloading of cargo," and tells them they must furnish containers needed and allocate "vessel space accommodations, in consideration of reasonably foreseeable import and export demands." They cannot "unreasonably decline export cargo bookings if such cargo can be loaded safely and timely, as determined by the Commandant of the Coast Guard, and carried on a vessel scheduled for the immediate destination of such cargo."
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and the United Kingdom's Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan said they want to consult on steel and aluminum early next year, "with a view to combating global excess capacity and addressing outstanding concerns on US tariffs and UK rebalancing measures," according to a U.K. readout of the visit Dec. 8. It said that Trevelyan invited Raimondo to London for those further talks in January.