The House Ways and Means Committee is set on April 17 to consider several just-introduced trade bills, including a retroactive extension of the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program, new restrictions on de minimis and restrictions on electric vehicle tax credits.
The International Trade Commission is beginning a Section 201 safeguard investigation on possible injury to domestic industry by imports of fine denier polyester staple fiber, it said in a notice released March 12.
Three domestic manufacturers filed a petition Feb. 28 asking the International Trade Commission to conduct a Section 201 safeguard investigation on imports of polyester staple fiber.
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissioner Kimberly Glas, calling e-commerce "a superhighway of the Wild West," asked witnesses at a hearing on Chinese exports and product safety if de minimis is a major contributor to unsafe products.
Allowing large numbers of electric vehicles from Chinese companies assembled in Mexico would be an "extinction event," warned the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a nonprofit co-founded by large domestic manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union.
Midway through the second term of solar safeguards, imports of solar panels (modules) and cells have been climbing, and the market has almost entirely shifted to bifacial solar panels, which were at first carved out of the safeguard. Whether a decision to revoke that exclusion in 2019 was legal is still being litigated (see 2311130031 and 2401290014).