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.
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.
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."
Presidential proclamations for Section 232 steel tariff rate quotas for EU countries, and for tariff rate quotas for aluminum, were published Dec. 28, with no changes to aggregate volume from the last two-year deal. The new quotas will last through the end of 2025.
China sanctioned American compliance risk advisory firm Kharon, a Kharon researcher and a researcher at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in reaction to recent U.S. sanctions announced on Human Rights Day earlier this month (see 2312080026).
More than 400 products that are excluded from Section 301 tariffs will continue to enter under normal duties through May 31, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced Dec. 26. The exclusions had been scheduled to end at the end of this year.
Apparel, which accounts for about 37% of imports covered by Caribbean Basin Initiative and Haiti-specific programs, may no longer support jobs in Haiti if a renewal of at least 10 years isn't passed well ahead of Haiti's HOPE and HELP programs' expiration in October 2025, industry is arguing.
The Biden administration is expanding its ban on importing certain Russian seafood and diamonds so that seafood caught in Russian waters or by Russia's fishing fleet but processed elsewhere, including in China, will be banned. The ban on industrial diamonds also has expanded so that those diamonds, if incorporated into goods in another country, also are banned.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., a longtime advocate for sugar policy revisions and increased sugar imports, asked the Agriculture Department and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative "to swiftly implement recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its recent report, 'Sugar Program: Alternative Methods for Implementing Import Restrictions Could Increase Effectiveness'" (see 2310310063). The report, which noted that raw sugar imports haven't filled the tariff rate quotas in any of the past 27 years, recommended USDA evaluate alternative methods of allocating raw sugar TRQs, and that USTR consider other allocation methods that would meet World Trade Organization obligations.