Advocating for a bipartisan bill introduced by Southwestern lawmakers to direct certain fees to land port expansions, equipment investments and staffing was the top priority for customs brokers in town to lobby as part of the group's annual government affairs conference.
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.
The National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, in a conference session preparing its members for a day lobbying on Capitol Hill, said that the NCBFAA is not arguing for or against a de minimis restriction proposal from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. The proposal would require all goods entering in de minimis to be classified with a 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule code and would bar apparel, footwear and other "import-sensitive" goods from eligibility.
The U.S. will ban the import and sale of vehicles with hardware or software that facilitates communication to GPS satellites and drivers' cellphones, or software and hardware that allow driverless operation, if those goods come from China or Russia, under a notice of proposed rulemaking.
While a top CBP official didn't give any specifics on how many brokerages were suspended from a pilot that allows electronic clearance of de minimis packages (see 2405310054), he told attendees at an annual National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America conference not to "be afraid of that enforcement," as the brokers who were suspended were so lax that there wasn't even anything that the companies could argue about with CBP.
The Commerce Department is proposing that no Chinese or Russian software or hardware that enables cars to use GPS, connect to cell phones, or other external communication facilitators will be allowed to be imported, because the government believes that these are security risks.
The leading Democrat in efforts to restrict de minimis in the House of Representatives, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore, has tried to restrict de minimis eligibility since the beginning of 2022, and has said that getting a bill passed is how he'd like to end his career in Congress (see 2402150060).
Rubio introduced a bill that would change the country of origin for goods so that a company owned by or based in China or any other "foreign adversary" would assign the adversary country of origin to those companies' goods, no matter where the goods were manufactured. The bill is silent on whether that would also apply to U.S.-manufactured goods by Chinese companies, such as Volvo cars.
A former Trump administration trade official said he can't predict whether a global 10% or 20% tariff will be imposed early under a potential new Trump administration, or exactly how tariffs on Chinese goods might be hiked, but Akin partner Clete Willems said he's telling business people to take these ideas seriously, even if every proposed change doesn't come true.
Former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, who was a Republican representative from Michigan, told a think tank audience that the lame duck session of the current Congress is likely to be consumed with government funding negotiations, and that leadership is unlikely to put a vote on the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program on the calendar, no matter its logic, unless members of both legislative bodies actively lobby the leaders of his former committee and the Senate Finance Committee.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., along with two other Republicans and another Democrat, recently reintroduced the Stop Importation and Manufacturing of Synthetic Analogues (SIMSA) Act.