The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:

Luggage importer Samsonite filed a complaint at the Court of International Trade on Aug. 29 to contest CBP's alleged failure to apply Section 301 exclusions granted by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to its baggage entries (Samsonite v. United States, CIT # 24-00031).

Higher or new Section 301 action on Chinese goods such as batteries, EVs, plug-in hybrids, ship-to-shore cranes, solar cells and panels, syringes, needles, critical minerals, some metals will not go up until at least September, as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has missed a second self-imposed deadline. The proposed changes, first announced in May, said some tariffs would go up on Aug. 1, but on July 30, the office said it had not finished responding to more than 1,100 comments, and it would make a final determination in August (see 2407300047).

The following are short summaries of recent CBP NY rulings issued by the agency's National Commodity Specialist Division in New York:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit didn't select the Section 301 litigation for its October schedule, setting up early November as the earliest time the case could be heard. Matt Nicely, counsel for the lead plaintiffs in the case involving over 4,000 companies, said in an email that he's "optimistic" oral argument in the action "will still happen before the end of the year." All arguing attorneys finished submitting their notices of conflicts with oral argument in April (HMTX Industries v. United States, Fed. Cir. # 23-1891).

National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told China's foreign minister that the U.S. is still concerned about the Chinese government's "unfair trade policies and non-market economic practices," according to a White House readout that focused more on military and law enforcement issues than trade.

An importer filed Aug. 21 its long-delayed motion for judgment in its test case alleging its Chinese-origin selective catalytic reduction catalysts had wrongly been assessed Section 301 duties. The catalysts were misclassified by CBP as centrifuges instead of “reaction initiators, reaction accelerators and catalytic preparations, not elsewhere specified or included,” it said (Mitsubishi Power Americas v. U.S., CIT #21-00573).

The Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank's "Trade Guys" podcast said that the EU's tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles (see 408200020) "is sort of a preview of coming attractions."

Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg, who serves on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says his recent Foreign Affairs essay on addressing Chinese exporting ambitions is an effort to put forward a vision of what "we want the global economy to actually look like," something he says has been missing in the piecemeal efforts of Section 301 tariffs, EU trade defenses and anti-coercion instruments and other reactions to Chinese nonmarket overcapacity.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies "Trade Guys" said that while there is some pressure on Congress to get the Generalized Systems of Preferences benefits program renewed, and restrict de minimis, competing pressures make it unlikely bills will become law this year.