CBP May Leave Funding Questions Out of Customs Modernization Effort

CBP's legislative proposal related to the 21st Century Customs framework may leave out discussion of possible alternative funding sources, said Garrett Wright, who leads the 21CCF effort as director of trade modernization at CBP's Office of Trade. "We are considering decoupling insufficient funding from the rest of this 21CCF package and focusing our efforts on what would be authorizing language," he said. Once "any one of those statutes gets passed, then we can have a conversation with the Hill about how to best fund."

Wright discussed what might be included in the proposal at a high level during a Sept. 22 webinar hosted by Geodis. CBP has started sharing its "discussion drafts" for proposed statutory changes with industry under non-disclosure agreements, Wright said. The "starting point statutory amendments" remain "pre-decisional" and haven't gone through the interagency review process because CBP wants to have some initial industry feedback first, he said. "We are walking the task force through" the proposed statute changes based on the "challenge" the change would help resolve, he said. "So far, we've covered 'restricted data collection,' 'limited data usage' and 'narrow visibility and accountability,'" he said.

The meetings are on hold until the next term of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee gets underway, Wright said. "I'm hearing that the COAC members should be confirmed and fully vetted soon," he said. Once COAC returns, "we'll pick back up with 'ineffective and untimely enforcement.'" Instead of the discussion regarding funding, CBP may "rather focus on industry benefits and facilitation," he said. CBP provided information on the industry groups and companies represented on the 21CCF task force, which is now up to around 100 members, but hasn't named the individuals involved (see 2107200067). The agency did provide a list of industry members on the "focus group" that will review the recommendations from the task force before being sent to the COAC.

The focus group includes both government and industry members and will make "joint recommendations whether or not to incorporate the feedback and ideas that were received by the broader group," he said. Once the recommendations go up through the COAC, the proposals will be made public, Wright said.

Timing for the statutory changes are at "the whim of Congress," but Wright hopes to be able to show lawmakers something that "fully reflects industry feedback through the task force and other avenues," by around spring of next year, he said. Once the statutes are changed, there would be "iterative" steps toward implementing the regulations, he said. Similar to how CBP can share intellectual property rights information, CBP is looking at how it can share "additional risk information with our industry partners that they can use to better manage risk within their supply chain" as part of the legislative proposal, he said.