When most people think of advocacy, they think about  Congressional activity – Hill visits, fly-ins, and staff meetings.  That is definitely a big part of NAFTZ’s advocacy activities, but it isn’t all that we are working on to promote the FTZ program and to help U.S. businesses be more competitive.  This month, we’d like to highlight some other types of advocacy in which we are just as engaged.

Hearing Testimony

Often the Administration and Congress ask questions of the public in order to learn more about how policy and laws impact the citizens or to get ideas on how they should address topics.  This is done through hearings.  Those hearings are typically public, and participation looks different depending upon the type of hearing it is and the way in which input is solicited.  Here are a couple of recent examples:

• USTR Hearing on Supply Chain Resiliency  

The USTR published a Federal Register Notice (FRN) asking for input on “promoting supply chain resilience”.  You can read the full FRN here .  In the request, USTR asked for specific types of feedback around supply chain transparency, diversity and security and sought specific input regarding select industries identified as particularly critical by the administration.  In this case, NAFTZ created a task force to draft written testimony to address the details of the request, which were submitted to the public record and you can find here and our President, Jeff Tafel, gave oral testimony on May 23.  In our statements, NAFTZ advocated that the federal government has a powerful tool in the U.S. FTZ Program in helping U.S. companies strengthen their supply chains and to create more opportunity for U.S. operations to be globally completive and resilient, and we offered suggestions on how federal agencies can work together to further benefit the U.S. economy though our program.

• Senate Finance Committee Hearing

NAFTZ became aware of a hearing by the Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness being held on May 21 about “Examining Trade Enforcement and Entry of Merchandise at U.S. Ports”.  With the help of our NAFTZ Board member, Patty Cannon, Director of Special Projects and FTZ #99 Grantee Administrator within the State of Delaware’s Department of State, we got a meeting with the office of the Chairman of the Subcommittee, Sen. Carper (D - DE) to learn about the objective of the hearing and to discuss how FTZs fit into the supply chain security and the entry of goods into the US.  We were invited to submit comments for the record, and thanks to the hard work of the Task Force on Supply Chain Resiliency, was able to quickly draft comments for submission for this hearing as well based upon the data already gathered. This is an excellent example of how advocacy work builds upon itself, both in how quickly we were able to get a meeting thanks to previous relationship building work and being able to submit comments with very short notice because of previous comment drafting.

Agency Meetings

Sometimes advocacy takes the form of meetings with other government agencies, such as those that regulate imports along side CBP.  One example is the ongoing work with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).  CPSC continues to work on reporting requirements for products under their control.  Many FTZs handle these goods, and it is important that NAFTZ works with the agency to ensure that FTZ procedures are addressed in the agency’s reporting requirements.  NAFTZ has a CPSC Working Group that has both submitted comments to the public FRN request for comments on the CPSC regulations, and has continued dialog with the agency, including a meeting scheduled on May 31.