Eighteen senators, led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., are asking the administration to convince Europe to remove 25% retaliatory tariffs on American whiskey before it's scheduled to double on June 1. The tariff was imposed in response to 25% tariffs on European steel. Their May 11 letter said that whiskey exports to the European Union fell by 37% since the tariff went into place, and exports to the United Kingdom fell by 50%. "Like other small businesses involved in the food and drink industry, American craft distillers have struggled during the pandemic, as on-site sales and sales to restaurants and bars declined substantially. Nearly a third of craft distillers’ employees have been furloughed since the start of the pandemic. These employers are just now starting the road to recovery and the continuation, and potential increase, of these tariffs will inhibit this recovery. ... As the Biden administration works to address trade disputes with our allies in Europe, we urge the administration to work to secure the immediate suspension of tariffs on American Whiskey and, ultimately, the permanent removal of all retaliatory tariffs on American, EU, and UK spirits and wine."
U.S. ports and the broader freight transportation network are still facing significant backlogs and extreme pressure from congested global supply chains, industry officials told a Senate subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Maritime, Freight and Ports May 11. Some officials called for a clear national strategy to address the issues and provide more funding for ports nationwide.
One Democrat and one Republican from each chamber sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, asking the administration to reexamine the decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, a decision they called “misguided and short-sighted.” The May 5 letter, led by Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, a close ally to President Joe Biden, also acknowledged that “there are significant political obstacles to negotiating an agreement to rejoin the TPP in its current form.” But Carper, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said there should be an effort to determine the best course for engagement with the countries that continued on without the U.S. to see how they could build on recent trade agreements.
Uyghur Human Rights Project Board Chair Nury Turkel told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his nonprofit wants swift passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would create a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang province were made with forced labor. "The 11 current Withhold-release orders (WROs) are a wholly inadequate response to the gravity of the crimes, the harm to American workers whose wages are undercut by forced-labor competition, and the unwitting complicity of American consumers who buy face masks, hair weaves, cotton apparel, and solar panels produced by the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs," he said in his prepared testimony.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai will testify on the administration's trade policy agenda next week, appearing May 12 at 9:30 a.m. before the Senate Finance Committee and May 13 at 10 a.m. before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., joined by three Democrats and two Republicans, introduced a bill in March that asks the administration to develop a strategy to increase exports to African countries by 200% in real dollars within 10 years of the bill's passage into law. The bill's text was published May 1. To achieve this goal, the bill suggests the administration help U.S. businesses with expertise in energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, technology and agriculture develop relationships with African governments. It also said the U.S. should promote economic integration in Africa, including the development of customs unions between western and central Africa and eastern and southern Africa “eliminating time-consuming border formalities into and within these areas, and supporting regionally based infrastructure projects.”
As U.S.-China technology competition grows, Congress may consider mandating stronger export controls over U.S. research and semiconductor equipment, the Congressional Research Service said in a report this month. Congress might consider “assessing” whether Chinese efforts to target U.S. research and development capabilities “merits additional government oversight and controls over U.S. basic and applied research,” the report said. Congress might also consider more restrictions over “technical expertise that U.S. industry shares with China over open source technology platforms” and more controls over exports of semiconductor equipment, tools and software. The Commerce Department is reviewing candidate controls for its emerging and foundational technology process (see 2103190037) and has received pushback from universities that are concerned those controls could restrict fundamental research (see 2012020044).
Two senators reintroduced a bill this month that would require the U.S. to conduct a study on the effects of foreign direct investment on the U.S. pharmaceuticals industry. The U.S. Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Review Act, reintroduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., would require the Treasury Department to provide a report to Congress on how foreign direct investment “affects the nation's ability to produce drugs, as well as their key components.” It would also require a report about how foreign investment in “U.S. genome sequencing technologies affects domestic capacity to sequence or store DNA” and the number of transactions that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has reviewed in the last year involving the “sequencing or storage of DNA.”
The U.S. should lead the charge to reopen the Environmental Goods Agreement in Geneva, House Ways and Means Republicans wrote April 22, on Earth Day. This follows a resolution introduced earlier in the month by four pro-trade Democrats calling for the same thing (see 2104080050).
Clete Willems, a former Donald Trump administration trade staffer, told the Senate Finance Committee that technology sales to China help pay for research and development here, so as Congress considers how to bolster the semiconductor industry, it should also be sure not to put export controls on goods that are not sensitive.