Sen. Todd Young Will Co-Sponsor Level the Playing Field Act 2.0

Level the Playing Field Act 2.0, a bill that would rewrite antidumping and countervailing duty laws, has found a Republican co-sponsor after the retirement of the Republican co-sponsor on the bipartisan bill introduced in 2021 (see 2104160037).

Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., said in a brief interview at the Capitol that he will be co-sponsoring the bill in this Congress. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, is the lead Democrat on the bill. "We have extensive steel production interests in the state, and the Chinese in particular have manipulated the market, so [we] want to crack down on those practices," Young said.

Young has a recent history of pulling together the votes needed to get bills through the Senate -- he was a leader in the Chips bill push.

The bill would provide for expedited “successive investigations” when a product subject to a trade remedy order sees an import surge from a new country after duties are imposed. It instructs the International Trade Commission to look at the relationship between the new investigation and the concurrent or recently concluded investigation on the same product.

A lawyer who represents respondents said in a telephone interview that he doesn't know how worried to be about the bill, because some of these proposals don't have a chance of passage, but said: "We hate these things. Because we feel the ground is already unlevel" in favor of petitioners. "We’re not a fan of these protectionist measures. We’re already seeing the circumvention inquiries, in our view, being used to supplant petitions."

He said Level the Playing Field Act changed the law for adverse facts available, so that Commerce doesn't have to take into account what's commercially reasonable when setting antidumping duty rates.

"We still have post-traumatic stress disorder from the first one," he quipped.

"We’re concerned about making" the anti-circumvention inquiry "even more of a hammer."

The lawyer said that there's been a massive uptick in circumvention investigations, both initiated by Commerce and petitioned for by domestic companies. He said that while typically, importers owe deposits from the date the circumvention began, Commerce has the authority to say that deposits are due on all unliquidated entries, as long as the imports happened after Commerce issued its revised regulations on circumvention investigations.

"I get that they’re tired of the sort of a whack-a-mole," he said, but said the ability to go back and collect deposits before a circumvention investigation was announced is "a new powerful mechanism for petitioners to get at the whack-a-mole" issue. He also said he used to be a petitioner's counsel, and he understands the lobbying advantage domestic companies have.

Level the Playing Field Act 2.0 would address extraterritorial subsidies. It would require the Commerce Department to begin or reject anti-circumvention inquiries within 20 days of a complaint, and asks that a preliminary determination be achieved within 90 days of beginning the investigation, and a final determination within 120 days. However, each of those steps could be extended under the statute's deadlines, up to 180 days for the final determination.