National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told China's foreign minister that the U.S. is still concerned about the Chinese government's "unfair trade policies and non-market economic practices," according to a White House readout that focused more on military and law enforcement issues than trade.
American drone maker Anzu Robotics produces DJI drones, not its own designs, allege the leaders of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
Sayari analysts, who say their company crunches 600 million shipment records, say that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has had more impact than British, German, Swiss, Canadian and French laws aimed at removing human rights abuses from supply chains.
CBP still hasn't been able to properly police fraud in drawback claims, where importers claim drawback funds for merchandise that was never exported, the Government Accountability Office says in a summary of unresolved recommendations for the Department of Homeland Security.
Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg, who serves on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says his recent Foreign Affairs essay on addressing Chinese exporting ambitions is an effort to put forward a vision of what "we want the global economy to actually look like," something he says has been missing in the piecemeal efforts of Section 301 tariffs, EU trade defenses and anti-coercion instruments and other reactions to Chinese nonmarket overcapacity.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies "Trade Guys" said that while there is some pressure on Congress to get the Generalized Systems of Preferences benefits program renewed, and restrict de minimis, competing pressures make it unlikely bills will become law this year.
The Coalition for a Prosperous America, which advocates for protecting American manufacturing, said the new Senate Finance Committee bill to restrict de minimis moves "things in the right direction," even more than the bill that passed the House Ways and Means Committee in the spring.
Former President Donald Trump said last week that he might put not just a blanket 10% tariff on imports from countries other than China, but 20% tariffs, at least on "foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years" (see 2408140058).
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has projected that applying Section 301 tariffs to the contents of packages that previously benefited from de minimis, as proposed in the House (see 2407080049), would increase revenue from tariffs by about $23.5 billion in the 2024-2034 period, but would only require reprogramming of ACE and more money for data storage and ACE maintenance, not new CBP officers. The CBO estimated that improving ACE would cost $3 million, and that CBP would need $2 million annually to maintain the system.
Trade associations are generally pleased with the trade facilitation discussion draft issued in the Senate last week (see 2407310037), though they all noted that moving to a true one-U.S.-government data submission and release regime requires money, which may not follow, even if the bill becomes law.