The Commerce Department failed to consider whether U.S. Steel Corp. had the capacity to fill the aggregate of importer California Steel Industries' Section 232 steel tariff exclusion requests as opposed to just assessing whether U.S. Steel could fill all of them individually, the Court of International Trade held on Nov. 13. Judge M. Miller Baker added that Commerce didn't address its concession that it couldn't timely supply more slab than contracted for with California Steel.
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Running a large trade surplus with the U.S. is only one way to draw President-elect Donald Trump's tariff fire, argues a new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; other ways would be by expecting the U.S. to provide a defense umbrella, enacting digital services taxes or other anti-U.S. regulations, and taking what ITIF called "soft positions toward China."
The Steel Manufacturers Association is asking President-elect Donald Trump to curtail current Section 232 quota restrictions and to end Section 232 exemptions for some Mexican products, to expand Section 232 to more downstream products, and greatly narrow exclusions to the tariffs.
The exclusion process for Section 301 tariffs was understandable in one regard -- requests for goods linked to China's technology supremacy strategy known as Made in China 2025 were less likely to be successful.
President Joe Biden nominated Jim Coughlan, the Export-Import Bank's general counsel, and Haile Craig, a Republican nominee, for the International Trade Commission on Nov 21.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee majority, who will lead the extension or expansion of the first Trump term income tax cuts, are expressing some hesitancy about using tariffs as a pay-for.
CBP has defined two dates for when the agency expects to deploy ACE enhancements related to steel melt and pour country reporting and when CBP hopes to implement Phase 3 of the Section 232 trade remedy on aluminum smelt, according to CBP's ACE development schedule for November.
A past trade staffer from the Senate Finance Committee said that if Congress wanted to write tariffs into law in order to use that revenue as a partial pay-for in tax cut extensions, those tariffs would likely wait until January 2026, as that's when the tax laws would take effect.
In less than three months, President Donald Trump will be back in the White House, after a campaign during which he floated 10% or 20% tariffs on all countries except China, which would be hit with an additional 60 percentage points on top of current tariffs.