CBP's legislative proposal related to the 21st Century Customs framework may leave out discussion of possible alternative funding sources, said Garrett Wright, who leads the 21CCF effort as director of trade modernization at CBP's Office of Trade. "We are considering decoupling insufficient funding from the rest of this 21CCF package and focusing our efforts on what would be authorizing language," he said. Once "any one of those statutes gets passed, then we can have a conversation with the Hill about how to best fund."

More than 190 solar companies sent a letter Sept. 22 to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo urging the rejection of requests to begin anti-circumvention inquiries on solar cells and panels from Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. “Steep duties proposed by an anonymous group of petitioners would devastate thousands of U.S. solar companies and cause the industry to miss out on 18 gigawatts (GW) of solar deployment by 2023,” the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a press release.

As the sixth implementation phase of Lacey Act declaration requirements for plants and plant products approaches Oct. 1, officials with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service reminded importers and exporters that more phases are to come before the agency meets its statutorily required goal of subjecting all plants and plant products to Lacey Act enforcement.

CBP field officers were instructed to allow for foreign-trade zone storage of goods stopped under a withhold release order while an admissibility decision is made, said Jim Swanson, CBP director-cargo and conveyance security and controls, speaking at the National Association of Foreign-Trade Zones virtual conference Sept. 21. He said the agency told the “field folks to allow those goods” to be put “in a foreign-trade zone under the very tight conditions that we outline.” While Swanson previously said a public guidance would come soon (see 2104290003), he said at the conference that “we're still working on getting it in writing, because there's a lot of legal stuff and there's some changes going on in the background.”

International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from Sept. 13-17 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, said that in order to transition as soon as possible to renewable energy without doing so "on the backs of slave labor," the House of Representatives "must pass and the president must sign into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act." The Senate passed a version of this bill in July; a House version was included in the EAGLE Act, which passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Merkley's co-chair, Rep Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, said he felt the Senate approach was not strong enough (see 2107290018). Merkley and McGovern are both Democrats.

Customs brokers in Washington to lobby for the Customs Business Fairness Act renewal should also talk about the importance of the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2021, National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America transportation committee members told the annual government affairs conference attendees, as a way to fight excessive detention and demurrage fees.

A day after the White House's primary spokesperson said that if there's an opportunity to renegotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's a discussion the U.S. could join, a former White House trade negotiator said the path to reentering the TPP is so steep that he doesn't think it's likely in the next few years.

Importers should be reviewing existing tariff classifications for their products and planning ahead for major changes to the tariff schedule that will take effect Jan. 1 when the U.S. implements 2022 changes to the global Harmonized System, Flexport’s Adam Dambrov said during a Sept. 15 webinar. Particularly affected by the changes are goods of chapters 44, 84 and 85, with some changes to chapter notes also resulting in changes for textiles and apparel.

The Commerce Department will change its scope ruling procedures so that entries prior to the initiation of the scope inquiry are normally subject to suspension of liquidation and cash deposit requirements, but in a change from a 2020 proposal, will allow for requests to suspend liquidation at a later date, it said in a final rule amending its antidumping and countervailing duty regulations released Sept. 16.