Congress on Jan. 18 approved legislation to avoid a government shutdown one day before funding was set to expire for some agencies. The House voted 314-108 and the Senate voted 77-18 to approve the stopgap funding, which is now set to run out in early March. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the measure before midnight.
After members of Congress were blindsided by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative backing away from digital trade advocacy, they are taking no chances in spelling out their desire that the agency push for a continued moratorium on tariffs on digital goods. The World Trade Organization has renewed that moratorium since 1998, but some member countries want to start collecting duties on the sale of streaming movies, software as a service, and more.
Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., reintroduced a bill that would add digital trade policies to the eligibility criteria for the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program. He first introduced the bill in 2021 (see 2105100012).
The House of Representatives voted 403-9 to create a position of global trade specialist, consolidating several existing positions, including import specialist and drawback specialist.
A bipartisan House bill to consolidate CBP positions is scheduled to get a vote this week. Introduced by Reps. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., and Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., the measure would eliminate job descriptions of import specialist, entry specialist, national account manager, international trade specialist, drawback specialist and national import specialist, consolidating those duties under the job of global trade specialist. The bill previously passed out of the Ways and Means Committee unanimously (see 2311070066).
The House and the Senate have agreed to temporarily fund the federal government through March 1 or March 8, depending on the agency. The continuing resolution in place now ends, for some agencies, on Jan. 19. The two chambers still need to vote on the legislation to extend funding beyond the end of this week.
An agreement between the chairmen of the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees includes authorization for the administration to negotiate a fix to tax laws for foreign investment in Taiwan but doesn't include a renewal of the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program.
Nineteen members of the House of Representatives, along with three Pacific territory delegates, are publicly shaming Sysco for not cutting ties with Rongcheng Haibo, a processing plant in China that the Outlaw Ocean Project reported employs Uyghur laborers transferred from Western China (see 2310100030).
The chairman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on China asked the commerce secretary and the U.S. trade representative to use "all existing trade authorities" to hike tariffs on Chinese legacy chips, including those already incorporated into consumer goods, they said in an emailed news release.
Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that has been arguing that de minimis should only apply to gifts and goods brought by consumers as they return from abroad (see 2312140046), wants to kill the Customs Modernization Act of 2023, the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate that would update CBP authorities in a number of areas (see 2312110048).