The White House will hold a summit April 12 with the semiconductor industry to address the global semiconductor shortage and other supply chain issues. The meeting will include representatives from 20 major companies, including carmakers General Motors and Ford, chip companies GlobalFoundries and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and several major technology companies, including Alphabet, Dell Technologies and Intel, the White House said April 9. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo will also participate.

A brief sketch of President Joe Biden's budget priorities, released April 9, proposes increasing Commerce Department funding by 28%, or $2.5 billion. A bullet list of where extra funding would go, without line-item details, says the administration would increase hiring at the International Trade Administration, so that it could have sufficient resources “to defend U.S. workers by addressing unfair foreign trade practices and barriers, strengthening enforcement of U.S. trade laws, and enhancing oversight of foreign government compliance with trade agreements.”

President Joe Biden announced on March 30 he is nominating Tiffany Cunningham, partner at Perkins Coie in Chicago, for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cunningham is a member of Perkins Coie's patent litigation practice.

President Joe Biden plans to continue to address Chinese human rights violations and unfair trade practices, and soon will host an “alliance of democracies” to discuss how to better hold China accountable, he told reporters March 25. Speaking during his first formal news conference as president, Biden didn’t say when the meeting with allies will take place but said he will push partners to make China “follow the rules.”

On the same day that 37 trade associations worked to draw attention to a renewed push to eliminate Section 232 tariffs, a left of center think tank published a paper disagreeing with the arguments that the Tariff Reform Coalition is making, that steel and aluminum sanctions cost more jobs in manufacturing than they saved at primary steel producers.

White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will be meeting with some top Chinese officials March 18, but the trade war will not be front and center, he told reporters at a White House press conference March 12. A reporter asked what China would have to do for the U.S. to reduce or lift tariffs, or loosen export controls. “I don’t expect that, for example, the phase one trade deal is going to be a major topic of conversation next week,” Sullivan said; instead, it will be more about geopolitical issues and human rights, not details on tariffs and export controls. “But we will communicate that the United States is going to take steps, in terms of what we do on technology, to ensure that our technology is not being used in ways that are inimical to our values or adverse to our security. We will communicate that message at a broad level,” he said. He added that before the U.S. can begin negotiating on trade, there's more work to do with allies, “to come up with a common approach, a joint approach, before we go sit down point by point with the Chinese government on these issues.”

President Joe Biden signed a Feb. 24 executive order to address supply chain shortages of semiconductor chips, personal protective equipment, medicine and other critical goods. The order calls for a 100-day review of U.S. supply chains to pinpoint “vulnerabilities” impacting a range of goods, including certain pharmaceutical products, critical minerals such as rare earths, semiconductors and large-capacity batteries. The order also calls for a one-year review that will examine issues in a broader set of U.S. supply chains, including those impacting the defense industrial base, the public health base, the information and communications technology sector base, the energy sector industrial base, the transportation industrial base and the agricultural sector. The text of the order was not available as of press time.

President Joe Biden spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping for two hours, underscoring “his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices,” as well as human rights abuses in Xinjiang, according to a White House readout of the Feb. 10 call. In comments to reporters Feb. 11, he said it was a “good conversation.”

The Coalition of American Metal Manufacturers and Users, which includes a number of machining trade groups, a construction trade group and others, wrote a letter to President Joe Biden Feb. 10 to ask him to lift Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum. “The Trump steel tariffs have hurt small, family-owned manufacturers and the communities in which they built their businesses, while fracturing relations with overseas trading partners and spurring a frenzy of retaliatory trade measures -- with little to nothing to show for it at home,” the letter said. The coalition represents more than 30,000 companies in manufacturing and downstream supply chains. “More than 6.2 million Americans work in industries that use steel, while the steel industry itself directly employs only 140,000 workers,” it said, referring to tallies before the COVID-19 pandemic. “The data on employment in steel and aluminum production shows a muted benefit of approximately 1,000 more jobs. By comparison, a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors indicated that increased input costs due to the tariffs are associated with 75,000 fewer jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector.”

More than 70 trade groups from Europe and the U.S. asked President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to remove or suspend tariffs on goods outside of aerospace and steel and aluminum that have been targets in those trade disputes. “Suspending these tariffs is urgently needed to address the economic harms our industries are currently facing and will also be a positive step to help re-establish a cooperative Trans Atlantic trading relationship,” they wrote in a Jan. 25 letter. COVID-19-related shutdowns made 2020 a tough year for business, they said, and “the ongoing EU-U.S. trade disputes and additional tariffs which continue to plague Trans-Atlantic trade have made a bad situation worse.” Signers include food, wine and spirits interests on both sides of the Atlantic; European tool, cosmetics and perfume industries; and a broad array of U.S. trade groups, among them the American Chemistry Council, the National Retail Federation, the American Apparel and Footwear Association, and the American Association of Port Authorities.