Source: Blog – Alliance for American Manufacturing
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New bipartisan legislation would create the trade enforcement tools U.S. workers need to fight back.
Rampant trade cheating has plagued U.S. manufacturers for decades, eliminating millions of community-supporting factory jobs and eroding our manufacturing base. Of course, our manufacturers haven’t stood idly by. They’ve brought forth trade cases when they could, but this process can be long and costly. Worse still, trade cheaters have continually found still more underhanded ways to subvert trade norms. But there’s new legislation on Capitol Hill that would equip American workers with the modern trade tools they need to fight back.
The bill, titled Leveling the Playing Field Act 2.0, was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) and in the House by Reps. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) and Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) at the end of February.
As its name suggests, the bill is a sequel to the original Leveling the Playing Field Act, which became law back in 2015. This time around, lawmakers are aiming to address some of the ways that repeat offenders take advantage of U.S. trade laws, including by moving production out of one country into another — all while continuing the same unlawful practices that led to trade enforcement action in the first place.
The 2.0 version would create a new type of anti-dumping/countervailing duty (AD/CVD) investigation, called a successive investigation, to make it easier for petitioners to bring new trade cases when repeat offenders shift production to another country. The bill also seeks to create expedited timelines for successive investigations, so petitioners don’t have to start from square one when offenders shift production to a new country to dodge U.S. trade enforcement.
The Leveling the Playing Field 2.0 Act was first introduced in 2023, but didn’t get over the finish line. We cannot afford to let this U.S. trade remedy update fall by the wayside again. Ensure that American manufacturers can outcompete China and other bad trade actors with this bipartisan legislation now.
Roughly half of all unfair trade cases in the United States are related to the steel industry, but the impact of trade cheating extends well beyond, damaging a wide swath of industries from tires to furniture.
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