In West Virginia, where the first House Ways and Means Committee hearing of the new Congress was held since the Republicans won the majority, the members asked questions of business owners, and were hosted by a mid-sized business that sells hardwood lumber to furniture makers, cabinetmakers and flooring manufacturers.
Mara Lee
Mara Lee, Senior Editor, is a reporter for International Trade Today and its sister publications Export Compliance Daily and Trade Law Daily. She joined the Warren Communications News staff in early 2018, after covering health policy, Midwestern Congressional delegations, and the Connecticut economy, insurance and manufacturing sectors for the Hartford Courant, the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper (established 1674). Before arriving in Washington D.C. to cover Congress in 2005, she worked in Ohio, where she witnessed fervent presidential campaigning every four years.
Japan brought up issues it has around the Inflation Reduction Act, while the U.S. asked Japan to increase its use of ethanol and have better regulatory transparency for "certain products and services," according to a readout of a trade discussion between the two countries released Feb. 3 by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Attorneys in the Latin American practice at Miller & Chevalier said that DOJ has been emphasizing the kind of corporate oversight it expects to prevent bribery cases, and said that the agency wants to see compensation structures that incentivize compliant behavior, the use of data analytics for monitoring employees, preserving data from personal cell phones, and, if there is a violation, conducting a root cause analysis.
Fourteen Republican senators, led by Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio, wrote to the treasury secretary and secretary of state as the Cabinet officials traveled to China to meet with President Xi Jinping.
Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., introduced a bill directing the administration to impose sanctions on an Iraqi militia group, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which he said conducted attacks against U.S. soldiers in Baghdad. The bill is called the Sanctioning Iranian-Backed Militia Terrorist Act.
Although those on the Senate Agriculture Committee hailed the 14% surge in agricultural exports in 2022, when the value reached an all-time high of $196 billion, a half-dozen senators pressed USDA Undersecretary of Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Alexis Taylor on Mexico's plan to block the import of genetically modified corn.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., is working on a bill to revise certain aspects of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, he said in a brief interview at the Capitol last week. There are a “lot of opportunities” under the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) partnership that “we haven’t realized right now,” Gallagher said, adding that the ITAR “remains a barrier to cooperation with the Aussies and the Brits.” It “makes no sense to me,” he said.
A former undersecretary of Commerce now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Bill Reinsch, said there has been relatively little impact on chip companies and chipmaking equipment companies from export controls on sales to China announced last October (see 2210070049).
The Combatting Global Corruption Act, a bill that would rank countries on their efforts to fight corruption, and would direct the State Department to evaluate whether the worst offenders should be subject to Magnitsky Act sanctions, was introduced this week in the Senate. It's the same bill that was introduced in early 2021 (see 2102120035).
Two U.S. readouts of the meetings between deputies from the three USMCA countries focused on a multitude of irritants and concerns the U.S. has with Canada and Mexico but didn't mention talks on how to resolve the U.S. violation of USMCA in its interpretation of the auto rules of origin (see 2301110058). Mexico and Canada did not issue their own readouts.