National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America President J.D. Gonzalez said the trade group thinks the Customs Modernization Act is heavily focused on enforcement, and the group is "a little disappointed" that some of the items that NCBFAA talked about with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., didn't find their way into this bill.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
Congress should remove permanent normal trade relations status for China, but rather than move Chinese imports into Column 2, it should create a China-specific tariff schedule "that restores U.S. economic leverage to ensure that the [Chinese government] abides by its trade commitments and does not engage in coercive or other unfair trade practices and decreases U.S. reliance on [Chinese] imports in sectors important for national and economic security," the House Select Committee on China wrote as one of its dozens of legislative recommendations in its "Strategy to Win America's Economic Competition with the Chinese Communist Party." The report, released Dec. 12, also recommended:
Business groups are asking the leaders of the appropriations committees in Congress to support money at the border in a funding request that also includes funding for the war in Gaza and Ukraine. In a letter last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, the National Council of Textile Organizations and the Airforwarders Association said CBP says it needs at least 4,000 more officers. The money in the request would cover 1,000 CBP officers.
The Customs Modernization bill introduced in the Senate allows CBP to access data from parties in the supply chain other than importers, allows those parties to update and amend their advance data, and authorizes a customs broker or importer of record to convert the pre-entry information into a certified entry filing.
A bipartisan pair on the House Ways and Means Committee argue that offering more generous competitive needs limitations under the Generalized Systems of Preferences benefits program will help importers shift supply chains out of China, and they recently introduced a bill that would reform the CNL program.
Large steel and aluminum corporations and associations representing small and medium-sized metal processors, recyclers and environmental advocates told the International Trade Commission that it's on the right track in the questions it's asking about embedded carbon in steelmaking and aluminum smelting, but that choosing detailed data is tricky, and, in some cases, not possible for smaller companies to produce. Broadly, there are scope 1 emissions, which are the greenhouse gases produced through onsite processes; scope 2, which cover the purchased electricity needed for manufacturing and scope 3, which cover the embedded carbon of inputs, whether raw materials or semifinished goods.
A former EU director general for the bloc's climate action directorate defended its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, saying it's not designed to protect European heavy industry against imports from lower-cost economies.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said there is no interest in offering Taiwan "a very, very comprehensive, maximally liberalizing, aggressively liberalizing agreement." Tai, who was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum Dec. 7, was asked if the administration would pursue a free trade agreement with Taiwan, since Congress passed a bill welcoming such a negotiation. "We're not doing that with anybody right now," she added.
Because China is undermining the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) with its domestic market for pangolins and pangolin products, the White House should ban the import of "associated fish and wildlife" from China, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., ranking member on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., ranking member on the House Select committee on China, argue.
If a bill just introduced becomes law, importers of fossil fuels, refined petroleum products, petrochemicals, fertilizer, hydrogen, adipic acid, cement, iron and steel, aluminum, glass, pulp, paper, lime and gypsum products and ethanol would have to pay a duty at the border based on the carbon intensity of either the industry in the home country, the product, if a specific petition was made, or an economywide carbon intensity measure, if no reliable data is available by industry.