Former Biden Official Says President Will Issue De Minimis Proposal Before End of Year
A former Biden Administration official says de minimis reform is among the sitting president’s topmost priorities for his last 100 days in office.
Tim Manning, who served as the national Covid-19 supply coordinator for the Biden-Harris administration, said in a webinar with commerce and logistics solutions provider Cart.com that President Joe Biden will issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM)—which would lay out a plan for curbing de minimis package volumes—before the end of the year.
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“I would expect it’s very likely to see something…sometime through late November, maybe early December,” he said, noting that he is “100 percent confident” that the president’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, “will drive this process to an announcement of proposed final rulemaking before the end of the administration.”
The Biden Administration in September announced that it would take executive action against the Section 321 trade “loophole,” which is currently facilitating the entry of 4 million parcels into the U.S. consumer market each day, according to data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP). About half of the 1.4 billion de minimis shipments expected this year will contain textile and apparel products, with companies like Shein and Temu capitalizing heavily on the trade exemption.
“This dramatic increase we’ve seen over the past bunch of years in the volume of cargo coming in under the [de minimis] exemptions has just kind of created this very large universe that’s extraordinarily challenging for CBP to deal with,” Manning said.
The president’s executive framework for stemming the free flow of these shipments—which experts say contain fentanyl precursors and goods produced with forced labor—would bar certain shipments subject to other trade actions from utilizing de minimis.
Products subject to the punitive Section 301 duties placed on China-made goods during the Trump administration, for example, would no longer be allowed into the country duty free. Nor would shipments subject to Section 201 duties, which are issued by the president on goods that threaten domestic industry. Products subject to duties under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (for posing a risk to national security) would also be excluded from de minimis.
While the White House has made its intentions known that it plans to file a NPRM before Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump is sworn in in January, the review and implementation process could be lengthy, according to the former administration official.
“The way this works is that the cognizant agency, whoever has the authority oversight here—and in this case, it’s between Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and Treasury—would file a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the federal register. In that notice would be a summary of the situation, the laws, the authorities, the draft language of what they’re proposing…and then the timeline for implementation,” Manning said.
Following that filing, there will be a public comment period of 30 to 60 days, he added. The overseeing agencies will adjudicate on those comments for a period of weeks or even months before a final rule is issued and implemented.
“It’s unlikely for the final rule to happen before the end of the Biden Harris administration,” Manning added—and the timeliness of progress after the NPRM filing will depend largely on the victor of Tuesday’s election. “There is, I know, broad bipartisan support in making progress in this space,” he said. “The White House has called on Congress to act, because they can go quicker.”