Trade Cases
November 27, 2018
Senators Call for Review of Tariff Exclusion Process
Written by Tim Triplett
In response to widespread concerns about the pace, transparency and fairness of the Section 232 steel and aluminum tariff exclusion process, a bipartisan group of senators has requested that the Government Accountability Office conduct an independent review of the Commerce Department’s performance.
In a Nov. 26 letter to the GAO, U.S. Senators Doug Jones (D-Ala.), Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), and Tom Carper (D-Del.) called for the review. Commerce had received 49,301 exclusion petitions and had issued decisions for just 16,567 (34 percent) of them as of the end of October. In their letter, the senators called for GAO to investigate key questions about the current process, including the criteria used to approve or deny an exclusion petition, how to improve the pace of the process and the cost to taxpayers.
