International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from March 15-19 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.

When members of Congress had the opportunity to publicly tout their priorities for legislation this year at the House Ways and Means Committee, most of the Democrats emphasized social spending and ending the cap on state and local tax deductions on personal income taxes more than traditional infrastructure projects. Only one Republican, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, spoke at the March 23 hearing, to say that Republicans would boycott the hearing because holding a hearing without any expert witnesses was just a cover for “another multi-trillion, one-sided spending bill.”

The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee's Forced Labor Working Group's recommendations seem to be “of a piece of a general overall attitude by U.S. importers to try and ride out the current widespread public outrage,” the Southern Shrimp Alliance said in a March 22 letter to CBP's Office of Trade Forced Labor Division Director Therese Randazzo. The SSA said “each of these recommendations appears designed to complicate and further limit the agency’s ability to effectively enforce” Section 1307 of the U.S. Code. The COAC approved the recommendations for submission to CBP at a March 17 meeting (see 2103160027).

Lawyers for the roughly 3,700 Section 301 complaints inundating the U.S. Court of International Trade reached consensus on picking the first-filed HMTX Industries-Jasco Products action as the sole sample case in the massive litigation and on seating 15 among their ranks for the plaintiffs’ steering committee, HMTX-Jasco counsel Akin Gump said in the lawyers’ “coordinated proposal” March 19. Though plaintiffs “cannot guarantee 100% agreement on every issue on behalf of every single counsel,” they are “not aware of any objection to this proposal after repeated consultations and opportunities for review,” it said.

The Senate and House versions of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act have diverged fairly substantially and the law seems likely to ultimately be closer to the Senate approach, said Ray Bucheger, a lobbyist at FBB Federal Relations. The House bill is more punitive, including a requirement for CBP to name and shame importers whose goods are detained. The Senate bill requires public comment and a public hearing open to importers before establishing a strategy to prevent the importation of goods made with forced labor. Part of that process is expected to produce guidance to importers, and there will still be a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang region were made with forced labor, but if importers implemented the guidance, that would change the burden of proof, according to Bucheger.

Rep. Haley Stevens, co-chair of a new 34-member House Democratic Manufacturing Task Force, said that the last expiration of the Miscellaneous Tariff Bill hurt companies. “A lot of manufacturers lost out and a lot of hard-working manufacturing workers lost out on wages,” she said during a press conference March 18.

CBP's interpretation of the “core or super-core calculation” within USMCA will have a major impact on the auto industry, with billions of dollars “at stake,” Sandler Travis lawyer Lenny Feldman said at the March 17 meeting of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee. That calculation involves the regional value content, and CBP's stance differs from Canada's and Mexico's, he said. “Prior to July 1, there are some really urgent issues, particularly in the auto industry, that need to be addressed,” said Feldman, a COAC co-chair.

CBP is embarking “in earnest” on a process to develop a legislative package on a scale not seen since the Customs Modernization Act of 1993, said John Leonard, CBP executive director-trade policy and programs, at the March 17 meeting of the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee. Coming out of the agency’s work on the 21st Century Customs Framework (see 2011120010), the effort will begin with a new task force to provide a transparent “vehicle” to work with the trade community on the details of the legislation.

House Ways and Means Committee chief trade counsel Katherine Tai was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. trade representative on March 17, by a 98-0 vote. Politicians from both parties, trade skeptics and export-focused trade associations all hailed her promotion to the Biden administration Cabinet. She is the first woman of color to be USTR.

International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from March 8-12 in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.