Recent Funding Bill Included 'Transformative Sum' for CBP Forced Labor Efforts, Lawyer Says

Additional funding for forced labor enforcement included in the recently enacted omnibus federal spending bill is a “truly transformative sum,” supporting sizable increases in CBP personnel and advances in the technology the agency uses to support its forced labor efforts, customs lawyer John Foote said in a Jan. 6 blog post.

A summary of homeland security allocations in the omnibus says the bill provides $101 million to support efforts to prevent imports of goods produced with forced labor in FY 2023. That’s $51 million on top of what CBP received for forced labor enforcement in FY 2022, an increase of 108%.

“The increase in scope and volume of goods and the anticipated scale of petitions to the agency for every shipment will require increased resources at various ports and CBP Program Offices involved in the forced labor enforcement process to manage, audit, review, and to generate reports to Congress,” a CBP spokesperson said when asked about the increase.

A congressionally mandated Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act spending plan released by CBP in October provides a glimpse as to how the agency will use the increased funding.

At the time, CBP had planned to use some of the $27.5 million in dedicated UFLPA funding it received in 2022 to hire for 65 new positions, including trade analysts, trade intelligence investigators and support staff at the Office of Trade; five new attorneys at CBP’s Office of Chief Counsel; nine instructors for forced labor training; and two additional chemists to work in CBP labs.

Under the plan, an additional $43 million would go toward 300 new positions at CBP, including 151 import specialists; 50 CBP officers; 87 analysts, trade intelligence investigators, scientists, and support staff; five more attorneys; five more chemists; a hiring specialist; and a budget analyst.

The additional funding also would go toward new tools and technologies. New targeting tools would include technology for global supply chain maps for entities, facilities, products and shipments, highlighting where supply chains have links to Xinjiang and forced labor more broadly.

An “Advanced Trade Analytics Platform” would provide “updated data analytic elements to promote greater supply chain visibility,” including the use of satellite imagery to analyze form production and follow materials through the manufacturing process, and a dashboard to inform “internal and external partners on trends and data regarding the enforcement of the UFLPA.”

The plan says funding also would be spent to buy isotope ratio mass spectrometers to trace materials back to a specific location, as well as specialized training on use of the mass spectrometers to identify country of origin. Specialized nuclear magnetic resonance machines also are in the works for country of origin determinations. CBP also would build a reference database “to be used for country-of-origin identification with a nexus to forced labor source identification,” it said.