Up to Career Federal Employees to Ensure Single Window Remains Priority, DHS Official Says

The transition to the incoming Trump administration will be a period of “great uncertainty” for ACE, the single window and the government officials at the heart of the International Trade Data System effort, said Christa Brzozowski, deputy assistant secretary for trade policy, foreign investment and transport security at the Department of Homeland Security. The next few months will be an “exciting time,” but “frankly a little bit of a dangerous time,” as career federal employees that won’t be replaced during the transition work to ensure their higher-ups recognize the importance of the single window effort, she said at the Customs Commercial Operations Advisory Committee on Nov. 17 in Washington.

With the exit of political appointees under the new administration, remaining officials will be “saying goodbye to very good friends and colleagues and some amazing leaders,” but are “hopefully looking ahead to gaining some new ones,” Brzozowki said. For those that remain, “the job will be to make sure” single window efforts “make it up to the very top of the to-do list of the next administration, and the next team of leaders,” she said. Most important is “ensuring the continuity and the smooth transition” of the Border Interagency Executive Council (BIEC), which will be “instrumental in making sure that we make the best use of the new single window capabilities,” she said.

Mishandling the transition could lead the single window effort astray, Brzozowki said. “If we lose political will and the high-level engagement, and if we’re not coordinated in our decision making as a government and collaborative in that decision making with the private sector, we could find ourselves going down the wrong path.”

Going forward, there are “no plans at this point or in the future” to mandate the use of ACE, Brzozowski said, further backtracking from initial CBP plans for a “no hybrid” policy that would have forbidden filing in both paper and electronic environments on the same entry. Making ACE completely mandatory, including through the no hybrid rule, “were good stretch goals, but I think we all realized at the end of the day that an efficient system, one that performed well and from which all users derive value, is the best means to drive up use and get participants on board,” she said. “There will still be hybrid filings” and “paper is still in the process,” Brzozowski said. A CBP official said in July that the agency had no immediate plans to eliminate hybrid filing (see 1607270040).