Steel industry interests testified Feb. 16 that duty evasion is pervasive, and that customs enforcement cannot keep up. "Customs and duty evasion and circumvention occurs because there's opportunity and because there's lack of enforcement," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. "Our border protections with regards to fairly traded goods are underfunded."
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.
Worldwide tariffs on steel and aluminum or worldwide quotas on imports of those metals are two of the Commerce Department’s three recommendations on how to respond to plant closures and job losses in the domestic steel and aluminum industries. A flood of steel and aluminum, dumped at prices that undermine U.S. producers, is threatening the industrial base, and therefore national security, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told the White House in January. On Feb. 16, he shared the details of those reports with reporters on a conference call, and posted redacted versions of both reports on the department’s website.
The Trump administration floated a reduction to the Harbor Maintenance Tax in its recently released budget proposals. The administration called for collecting $300 million less per year in HMT because more money has been collected than is spent on harbor upkeep in recent years. The budget proposal says that if the lower level of harbor maintenance tax is collected, it "would provide greater flexibility for individual ports to establish appropriate fee structures for services they provide, in order to help finance their capital and operating expenses on their own."
A bill that would create a Commerce Department task force focused on potential self-initiated antidumping and countervailing duty investigations was to be introduced Feb. 14, Senators Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., announced. The International Trade Administration task force would investigate imports that could be subject to AD/CV duties and refer abuses for formal investigation. The bill instructs the task force to place its emphasis on small and medium domestic producers that are being undercut by unfair imports.
A bill that would retroactively renew the Generalized System of Preferences, and extend the program for developing countries until the end of 2020, passed the House of Representatives Feb. 13 by a nearly unanimous vote -- 400-2 in favor. A companion bill has not yet been introduced in the Senate.
President Donald Trump told 15 congressional Republicans and four Democrats visiting the White House Feb. 13 that he's considering quotas or tariffs to protect domestic steel and aluminum. Producers have been decimated by dumping from China and other countries, he said. He said he'd discussed "in great detail" on the campaign trail how U.S. steel and aluminum industries have been taken advantage of by other countries.
Ripping up NAFTA was one of President Donald Trump's biggest applause lines at his campaign rallies, and it's hard to see him walking away from that, given its importance "for the people he feeds off," said Grant Aldonas, a Commerce Department undersecretary for international trade during the George W. Bush administration, speaking Feb. 13 at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones conference. He encouraged attendees to lobby Congress to modernize and preserve NAFTA, but he noted that their arguments have to take into account the power of populism and the uncertain political environment as midterm elections approach. "You can see that [uncertainty] in retirements, especially on the Republican side," he said. "People are dealing with politics they don't recognize."
The Trump administration's budget request for fiscal year 2019 keeps funding for the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration largely flat. Still, that funding "would allow ITA to conduct robust investigations into alleged trade violations, aggressively advocate for U.S. businesses facing tariff and non-tariff barriers abroad, and increase the capacity to closely review proposed foreign investments in U.S. businesses." The request, released Feb. 12, said "the President insisted on a simple, but forgotten principle -- America First," and said that trade enforcement is a high-priority, mission-critical program.
President Donald Trump said during a Feb. 12 infrastructure event that a "reciprocal tax" may be coming because our allies are not allies on trade. "We cannot continue to be taken advantage of by other countries. We cannot continue to let people come into our country and rob us blind and charge us tremendous tariffs and taxes, and we charge them nothing. We cannot allow that to happen," he said, repeating for emphasis: "We cannot allow it to happen."
The Generalized System of Preferences, which expired at the end of last year, had its first move toward renewal Feb. 8, as the chairman and ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee introduced a bill that would extend the program for three years, the committee said in a press release. "When enacted, the bill introduced today will extend the program through December 31, 2020, and retroactively extend benefits to covered imports that have been made since the program lapsed," the release said.