PHILADELPHIA -- The glacial pace of developing electronically submitted export manifests is finally picking up, participants on a CBP export modernization panel said, with Tom Pagano, outbound enforcement policy branch chief, saying "we're really close."
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
PHILADELPHIA -- Getting the funding for ACE 2.0 is the biggest challenge, the executive director of CBP's trade transformation office said. He said the agency was unsuccessful in the budgetary process, and asked industry to lobby their representatives for funding.
PHILADELPHIA -- With the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act's second anniversary coming up in June, DHS will be releasing a new implementation strategy -- including adding new priority sectors, beyond cotton, tomatoes and polysilicon, the material integral to solar panels.
PHILADELPHIA -- Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that the "de minimis exception" impacts CBP's work to stop illegal drugs and other contraband from entering the United States.
PHILADELPHIA -- When CBP ran an audit to estimate how many packages that enter under de minimis violate Customs laws, it found about 9% did, either through misclassification, insufficient documentation, or more serious violations, like smuggling narcotics.
PHILADELPHIA -- Troy Miller, acting CBP commissioner, said that since stakeholders have said they're concerned that de minimis and trade cheating in USMCA and the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement is damaging the domestic and Latin American textile and apparel industries, the department will release a comprehensive plan to intensify enforcement soon.
PHILADELPHIA -- Bill Reinsch, a senior scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CBP Executive Assistant Commissioner AnnMarie Highsmith that he is pessimistic Congress will vote on any trade bill, whether liberalizing trade, as in the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program or the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill, or restricting it, as in changes to de minimis eligibility or changes to trade remedy laws.
House Ways and Means Committee members, in hallway interviews at the Capitol, said they're concerned that the Senate's unwillingness to take up a tax package that passed the House with more than 350 votes will delay movement on bringing back the Generalized System of Preferences trade benefits program.
Five senators, from both parties, want to end the 15% tariff on titanium sponge for most favored nations, and introduced a bill to change the tariff line.
Although the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee has been pushing to exclude Chinese goods from de minimis (see 2403060089), interviews this week with a half-dozen members of the 42-person committee show the momentum for changing the law is fairly muted.