Allowing the financing companies that own leased vehicles to claim tax credits irrespective of where electric vehicles and their batteries were made, and lengthening the timeline to cut China out of battery and critical mineral supply chains, runs contrary to the Inflation Reduction Act, argued Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin, and the ranking member of the committee, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.
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 government is considering adding seafood to its list of priority enforcement targets, joining cotton, polysilicon and tomatoes, according to testimony at a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight hearing.
Nineteen members of the House of Representatives, along with three Pacific territory delegates, are publicly shaming Sysco for not cutting ties with Rongcheng Haibo, a processing plant in China that the Outlaw Ocean Project reported employs Uyghur laborers transferred from Western China (see 2310100030).
U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Suzanne Clark criticized the Biden administration for not only choosing to avoid tariff liberalizing trade negotiations, but also for walking away from long-time positions on digital trade provisions. Clark, who was speaking at a press conference after the Chamber's annual State of American Business event, declined to say whether a second Donald Trump administration or another term of Joe Biden would be worse on trade.
House Ways and Means Committee Trade Subcommittee Chairman Adrian Smith, R-Neb., said he thinks the chances are good for renewing the Generalized System of Preferences benefits program in 2024, due to bipartisan interest in the legislation. "A lot of members have examples from their district of why we need GSP." He added that a three-year lapse of the benefit program is "inexcusable."
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who warned the White House that reducing the scope of the Section 301 tariff list or reducing tariff levels "could undermine efforts to shore up our domestic manufacturing and supply chains," said he doesn't know the details of what products might leave the target list if the White House hikes tariffs on electric vehicles or their batteries.
The chairman and ranking member of the House Select Committee on China asked the commerce secretary and the U.S. trade representative to use "all existing trade authorities" to hike tariffs on Chinese legacy chips, including those already incorporated into consumer goods, they said in an emailed news release.
Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that has been arguing that de minimis should only apply to gifts and goods brought by consumers as they return from abroad (see 2312140046), wants to kill the Customs Modernization Act of 2023, the bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate that would update CBP authorities in a number of areas (see 2312110048).
Companies, labor unions and domestic producer coalitions that support antidumping and countervailing duties on Vietnamese exports all said Vietnam has not changed its practices enough to be considered a market economy in AD/CVD cases in the 21 years since the last evaluation of its status found it wasn't.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in a radio interview in late December, explained that a bill he introduced with fellow Iowa Republican Joni Ernst and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., was "not in any way going to guarantee farmers lower fertilizer costs, but we just want to know why fertilizer prices are going up as high as they have." The bill directs USDA to detail how much fertilizer, of what types, and from what companies and countries, is imported into the U.S., and asks the department to describe the "impacts that antidumping duties and countervailing duties have on prices of fertilizer paid at the retail level."