Congress passed a bill that will end permanent normal trade relations status for Russian and Belarusian goods, with a unanimous vote in the Senate and a 420-3 vote in the House. It also codified the already accomplished ban on Russian fossil fuels, unanimously in the Senate and 413-9 in the House.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce continues to argue against including rewrites to antidumping duty and countervailing duty laws, and calls for tariff relief, John Murphy, the lead advocate on trade for the group, blogged about their trade priorities.
A recent Court of International Trade decision says domestic industry can’t use the interested party petition process to challenge individual entries, and are instead limited to challenges of how CBP treats the category of merchandise as a whole, customs lawyer Larry Richardson of Barnes Richardson said in a blog post April 4.
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Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, suggested that a provision in the Senate China package that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative must establish an exclusion process would garner bipartisan support across both chambers.
CBP disagreed with several assertions made by the DHS Office of Inspector General in a new report that questions CBP's oversight of the Centers of Excellence and Expertise. "When combined with inadequate procedural guidance for the Centers, there is heightened risk of importers illicitly attempting to avoid paying duties and fees and circumventing trade practices, defrauding the Federal Government, and undermining lawful business," the OIG said. "Further, unreliable data from information systems hinders CBP’s ability to inform legislation, policies, and programs to improve them and make them more efficient."
Importers are hoping that the guidance from the federal government on how to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act will help identify Chinese firms that are outside of Xinjiang but employ Uyghur or other minority Muslim workers through China's "poverty alleviation" programs. Goods from those factories will be presumed to be made with forced labor, but customs advisers from KPMG said identifying that nexus to forced labor in your supply chain is even more challenging than seeing if you have Xinjiang inputs several tiers down in your supply chain.
The unanimous three-judge opinion at the U.S. Court of International Trade remanding the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on April 1 for correcting deficiencies in the agency’s Administrative Procedure Act compliance extends the current litigation at least until mid-summer. The opinion, written by Chief Judge Mark Barnett and coming two months to the day after Feb. 1 oral argument was held (see 2202010059), gives USTR 90 days, to June 30, to respond to the remand order, and orders the plaintiffs and the government to submit a joint status report 14 days after that, including a proposed schedule on “the further disposition of this litigation.”
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative “properly exercised its authority” under the Section 307 modification provisions of the 1974 Trade Act when it ordered the imposition of the lists 3 and 4A Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports, the Court of International Trade ruled in an April 1 opinion. Test-case plaintiffs HMTX Industries and Jasco Products, plus the more than 3,600 complaints that followed, sought to vacate the tariffs on grounds that lists 3 and 4A were unlawful without USTR launching a new Section 301 investigation.
CBP aims to start development of “ACE 2.0” in 2025, building off the work going into CBP’s 21st Century Customs Framework (21CCF) and the legislative framework that emerges from that effort, said Gail Kan, CBP acting executive director for trade policy and programs, during a meeting of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee March 31.