Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., reintroduced the Fighting Trade Cheats Act, which would allow domestic manufacturers to sue foreign producers for customs fraud. It would double penalties, and establish a five-year prohibition on importing products from past violators.
In the first third of its first public hearing on promoting supply chain resilience, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and interagency officials heard from groups disputing the premise of the project -- that liberalizing trade was harmful to U.S. workers and manufacturing -- and from those who say the worker-centered trade approach of the Biden administration is not going far enough to restore American manufacturing.
The Commerce-led pillars of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework -- tax and anti-corruption, climate and supply chain -- are all completed or all-but-completed, but the U.S. chose not to talk about which parts of the trade pillar have reached agreement during a round of IPEF negotiations in San Francisco. The administration also is making no projections about when the trade pillar, led by the U.S. trade representative, might be completed.
The director of CBP's trade modernization office said CBP is packaging up the discussion drafts of what it would like to see in a 21st Century Customs Framework law, and sending them to the Office of Management and Budget so that the OMB can coordinate interagency comments and clearance of the language.
Four witnesses asked Congress to pass Level the Playing Field Act 2.0, a proposal that would change trade remedy laws in favor of domestic manufacturers, at a House hearing called the "Chinese Communist Party Threat to American Manufacturing."
The inability of CBP to stop all goods made with Uyghur forced labor was one of the focuses of a trade hearing hosted on Staten Island by the House Ways and Means Committee, and when committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., asked a witness what more could be done to crack down, Uyghur activist Nury Turkel said the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act should be expanded to cover all of China.
Reps. Mike Bost, R-Ill., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., are co-sponsoring Fighting Trade Cheats Act, a companion to a bill introduced in the Senate in March (see 2303160067).
A new bill introduced in the Senate March 15 would dramatically increase penalties for fraud and gross negligence and create a new pathway for civil lawsuits against customs violators from companies, labor unions and trade associations that have been injured by customs fraud.