Commerce Department Grants First 42 Product Exclusion Requests
The Commerce Department has made its first determination on steel product exclusions and will release that information shortly, Secretary Wilbur Ross said June 20, with 42 requests granted and 56 denied. He said that more or less every day, the Bureau of Industry and Security will be announcing its determination on batches of exclusions. Although it took from March 29 until June 20 to get the first exclusion determination, Ross, who was testifying in front of the Senate Finance Committee, said, "there is no huge backlog."
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So far there have been 8,168 steel product exclusion requests posted, and there are 9,310 pending. Refunds of tariffs paid are only retroactive to the date of posting. There have been 1,828 aluminum product exclusion requests posted, and 253 are pending. Some submissions are rejected as incomplete, and have to be refiled, adding to the delay before posting.
Ross told senators that the department has made "major progress in reforming and improving the process," and that it will be "immediately granting those that are correctly submitted, for which no objections are received." A lack of objections is not the only factor, because some of the product exclusion requests have no substance. "There is a high probability that relatively few of those [requests] will be granted," he said, either because of deficits in the requests, or objections by domestic smelters or mills that they can produce the product in question.
So far, there have been 3,939 objections filed to steel product exclusion requests and 98 filed to aluminum product exclusion requests, according to a chart Ross brought to the hearing. Of those objections to either metal, 235 were rejected by the department, and 1,944 are still to be evaluated, according to the chart.
Some of the product exclusion requests are for products from South Korea and Brazil, and no product exclusions are allowed for products covered by a quota, as products from those two countries are. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch asked Ross about that policy, and Ross said Commerce Department leadership is giving "real consideration" to asking the president if he would consider issuing an amendment to the original proclamation on steel and aluminum so that exclusions can apply to quota countries. Hatch also asked how companies can rebut objections to their requests, since there is no formal channel to do so. Ross did not answer that question.