Re-establish and expand in-person trade verifications, especially in China

Not started

Printed page 667 21. Department of Commerce

“Re-establish and expand suspended in-person pandemic-related verifications, particularly regarding the People’s Republic of China. Ensure that verifications are rigorous.”

What has happened

Sep 6, 2026 Not started
Nothing found, and the negative now reaches Enforcement and Compliance's own publications rather than only the Federal Register. E&C issues Department-level policy through numbered Policy Bulletins, and it publishes the whole series on one page: the newest bulletin on it is No. 10.3 of 2010-11-26, and there is no bulletin of any kind inside the evidence window — so a Department-level instruction re-establishing the suspended in-person verifications, in China or anywhere, does not exist in the place E&C would put it. ITA's press index, which lists every release the bureau has issued, carries eight in-window AD/CVD items (two solar and steel final determinations, three softwood-lumber review results, the tomato suspension-agreement withdrawal in two parts, and the EAPA duty-evasion determination of 2026-07-31) and not one on verification practice. Individual case notices in the window do record on-site verifications happening in the ordinary course, but a case notice is evidence about that case, not the policy the Quote asks for.
- 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

Negative search: Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for verification restricted to the International Trade Administration agency slug (returns only the routine per-case verification paragraphs inside individual AD/CVD determinations); a jq pass over every in-window ITA record; and grep -i 'verification' presidential-actions.ndjson (0). 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.

Individual case notices in the window do record on-site verifications resuming in ordinary practice, but a case notice is evidence about that case, not the Department-level policy the Quote asks for, and none of them says the suspended China verifications were re-established as a matter of policy. A read-queue row has been added for the Enforcement and Compliance pages on trade.gov, which an agent cannot enumerate.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row said E&C’s pages “an agent cannot enumerate (no sitemap route found)”. There is a sitemap: https://www.trade.gov/sitemap.xml is a five-child index and the children carry 13,201 URLs, fetched with a browser User-Agent. Grepping it produces the Enforcement and Compliance pages directly — the policy-bulletin series, the About Us page with the senior-staff list, the NME country and surrogate-country memo page, the careers page. Two further trade.gov traps found while looking, both worth the next agent’s time: trade.gov/press-releases ignores the ?page= parameter and returns the identical page for every value, so pagination there is an illusion (the single page happens to carry the whole archive back to 2016); and legacy.trade.gov does not present a matching TLS certificate, so it fails at the handshake rather than with an HTTP status.

Action: reinstate
Object: in-person AD/CVD verifications
ID: 1822