Trade Guys Predict No GSP, de Minimis Legislation in 2024

The Center for Strategic and International Studies "Trade Guys" said that while there is some pressure on Congress to get the Generalized Systems of Preferences benefits program renewed, and restrict de minimis, competing pressures make it unlikely bills will become law this year.

Bill Reinsch, Scholl Chair in International Business at CSIS, said last week that votes on GSP and de minimis won't happen next month, because, he believes, neither bill is significant enough to be something members up for reelection could brag about at home.

However, he did note that the House is supposedly taking up some China-related bills in September.

In the lame-duck session, "there's always pressure to finish stuff," he said, and GSP will have been expired four years by the end of this year. "De minimis has been debated extensively for two [years]," he said.

However, there are competing pressures. If Republican Donald Trump retakes the White House, his staff will tell Congress not to take action but wait until he's in office. If Democrats retake the House majority or the Republicans retake the Senate majority, the party about to take the majority also will want to wait until 2025 to act. Reinsch said it's possible the majority could flip in both chambers.

"That said, this stuff ought not to be controversial," he said. "Most people are for GSP renewal. Most people are for a de minimis fix. Most people are for AGOA [the African Growth and Opportunity Act], but I don't think that's going to play out this year."

However, he noted, there are different approaches to restricting de minimis, even though "they're all designed to stick it to China one way or the other."

Although the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee's top Democrat, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, was the first to push to remove Chinese goods from de minimis eligibility, he and his fellow Democrats voted against a bill that would remove about two-thirds of Chinese goods from de minimis, by prohibiting Section 301 covered goods from being able to enter duty free if they are in low-value shipments.

They also voted against GSP, because Republicans on the committee did not want to renew Trade Adjustment Assistance.

Reinsch said that because Democratic votes are needed in the Senate to move these bills, "if you're going to try to get all these things through, I think you're going to have to work something out on that [TAA]. And there's no sign of that happening."

Scott Miller, CSIS nonresident senior mentor, said that if the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative were negotiating an agreement anywhere in the world to lower tariffs, there could be support for renewing TAA. That there's no such negotiations makes it much more difficult to move forward, he said.

Reinsch said he expects some effort to move at least one of these bills in the lame-duck session. "I will be surprised, though, if it succeeds."