National Council of Textile Organizations CEO Kimberly Glas, speaking at a left-of-center think tank on trade policy, said that companies need to be able to file antidumping and countervailing duty cases without having to wait so long and pay so much money.
Fighting Trade Cheats Act
The Fighting Trade Cheats Act of 2023 or H.R.2667 is a bill introduced to Congress that would increase penalties for entities that knowingly flout U.S. trade law. The bill would allow any injured entity to bring a civil action against violators. The bill also includes a five-year ban on importing products from companies that have violated trade law.
In the first third of its first public hearing on promoting supply chain resilience, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and interagency officials heard from groups disputing the premise of the project -- that liberalizing trade was harmful to U.S. workers and manufacturing -- and from those who say the worker-centered trade approach of the Biden administration is not going far enough to restore American manufacturing.
The Commerce-led pillars of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework -- tax and anti-corruption, climate and supply chain -- are all completed or all-but-completed, but the U.S. chose not to talk about which parts of the trade pillar have reached agreement during a round of IPEF negotiations in San Francisco. The administration also is making no projections about when the trade pillar, led by the U.S. trade representative, might be completed.
An author of Fighting Trade Cheats, a bill that would create a private right of action for customs fraud and hike penalties for both fraud and gross negligence, said a customs modernization package could be a vehicle for his bill to become law.
The director of CBP's trade modernization office said CBP is packaging up the discussion drafts of what it would like to see in a 21st Century Customs Framework law, and sending them to the Office of Management and Budget so that the OMB can coordinate interagency comments and clearance of the language.
Four witnesses asked Congress to pass Level the Playing Field Act 2.0, a proposal that would change trade remedy laws in favor of domestic manufacturers, at a House hearing called the "Chinese Communist Party Threat to American Manufacturing."
A bipartisan group of House members and Senators have reintroduced a wide-ranging bill to change antidumping and countervailing duty laws, after the bill failed to advance last year.
The inability of CBP to stop all goods made with Uyghur forced labor was one of the focuses of a trade hearing hosted on Staten Island by the House Ways and Means Committee, and when committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., asked a witness what more could be done to crack down, Uyghur activist Nury Turkel said the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act should be expanded to cover all of China.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he'll use the 2021 trade title from the Senate China package as his committee works on its contribution to a second China package envisioned by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to address economic competition with China and to deter Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.
Reps. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., are co-sponsoring Fighting Trade Cheats Act, a companion to a bill introduced in the Senate in March (see 2303160067).