An administration Council on Supply Chain Resilience, which includes the head of every Cabinet-level agency except the Education Department, held its first meeting, with the goal of maintaining resilient supply chains.
CBP has been threatening ports that it will reduce its presence or even pull out of ports if those ports don't upgrade work space, members of Congress say, and a recently introduced bipartisan bill aims to put a stop to it.
The executive director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Secretariat said the perspective of what purpose APEC serves has changed. "We used to say trade and investment are our bread and butter," Rebecca Sta Maria said, referring to the goals of the 21 countries in the forum.
The text of a recent letter sent to the White House by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Bob Casey, D-Pa., suggests that they have been told there will be reductions in Section 301 tariffs, and they said in the letter that they have serious concerns that these reductions "will enable China and other global competitors to resume their anti-competitive activities without consequences. While not the subject of interagency review, we share similar concerns about reductions in 232 tariffs, as well as related actions that would undermine American steel and aluminum producers as a result of negotiations with the European Union on the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum."
A spotlight on Uyghur forced labor in auto parts manufacturing that began a year ago (see 2212060054) has not yet resulted in much action from CBP (see 2309210025), but forced labor researchers say that may not continue to be the case.
An academic and journalists from England and Foreign Policy magazine agreed that President Joe Biden got more out of the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping than Xi did.
Three-quarters of the Republican majority on the House Ways and Means Committee, along with five committee Democrats, told the U.S. trade representative that they oppose her "decision to abandon important bipartisan digital trade proposals at the World Trade Organization (WTO). This action, which was made without sufficient consultation with Congress, runs counter to the interests of American workers and businesses of all sizes and cedes more leverage to other foreign powers, including the Peoples’ Republic of China, that seek to write the rules of the 21st-century digital economy. We urge the administration to reconsider its approach."
The Senate voted 87-11 to approve a laddered temporary spending bill that will continue government appropriations at last fiscal year's level through Jan. 19 for some agencies and through Feb. 2 for others.
China said it will curb exports of precursor chemicals that make fentanyl and other synthetic opiates, after a previous crackdown on fentanyl trafficking led to the chemicals being sent to Mexico, where cartels turn them into opiates.
The White House said it will ask the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to "pursue effective and meaningful remediation of labor rights violations or to address gaps in labor rights protections," and asked USTR and the Department of Labor to develop new tools and strategies to address these gaps.