Make the surrogate country list development process transparent

Not started

Printed page 668 21. Department of Commerce

“Provide transparency in the surrogate country list development process.”

What has happened

Sep 6, 2026 Not started
Nothing in the window changes how the surrogate country list is built. But the note this replaces said the list is developed "without a published methodology", and that is not right: the methodology has been published since 2004 as Enforcement and Compliance Policy Bulletin 04.1, *Non-Market Economy Surrogate Country Selection Process*, and the outputs are published too — E&C maintains a public page carrying the current non-market-economy country list with its Federal Register citations and the dated surrogate-country memo for each NME, five of them refreshed inside the window (China, Russia and Vietnam on 2025-09-10, updated 2025-12-12 to correct an access date; Laos on 2026-01-29; Angola on 2026-02-06, both new NME designations at 91 FR 8407 and 91 FR 8419). That is standing transparency machinery predating the ask and continuing through it, which under §3b is the record moving nearby rather than delivery: nothing was done in the window *to make the process transparent*, because the Department's position is that it already is.
- NME Countries List and Surrogate Country List Memos — Enforcement and Compliance (as observed 2026-09-06; the page carries no date of its own, so it is dated at the observation and is approximate)
  Primary Executive branch Sep 6, 2026
- Enforcement and Compliance Policy Bulletins — the complete numbered series, newest No. 10.3 of 2010-11-26 (as observed 2026-09-06; the page carries no date of its own, so it is dated at the observation and is approximate)
  Primary Executive branch Sep 6, 2026

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Cluster negative search E&C-1 (chapter log): Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "self-initiation" (1 hit, a 2025-03-31 correction notice), "surrogate country" (73 hits, all individual AD/CVD case notices), "non-market economy" methodology (131, same), "Top Markets" (0); plus a jq pass over every in-window Federal Register record whose agency is the International Trade Administration, with the individual AD/CVD case notices filtered out. The "surrogate country" full-text search returns 73 in-window documents, every one an individual AD/CVD determination applying the existing list; none is a notice, rule or bulletin about how the list is developed.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06 — flagged for a later pass. With Policy Bulletin 04.1 and the published memo page both predating 2025-01-20, this is a candidate for pre_satisfied: true under ADR 0003 as amended. It is not flagged here, because the amended rule requires that nothing in the ask remain outstanding, and the Quote’s word is “transparency in the … development process”, which a 2004 bulletin describing the selection criteria and a list of finished memos may or may not satisfy — the memos themselves are the output, and the deliberation that picks among candidate countries in a given case is not published. That is a call for the consistency pass, not for a page-mate check.

Action: other
Object: surrogate country list development process
ID: 1834