Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Work with CBP to address duty circumvention and evasion

Partially done

668 21. Department of Commerce

“Work with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other relevant agencies to address circumvention and duty evasion, and promote policies that encourage full duty collection to ensure the integrity of AD/CVD and circumvention orders.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Commerce and CBP did the thing the Quote's first limb asks, once, and said so. "For the first time, in August 2025, the Department of Commerce submitted a duty evasion allegation to U.S. Customs and Border Protection under EAPA" — the Enforce and Protect Act — and on 2026-07-30 CBP determined that antidumping duties were being evaded on imports of carbon and alloy steel threaded rod from India (EAPA Case 8210, AD order A-533-887). Fourteen importers were found to have claimed the zero percent all-others rate instead of their producer's rate; CBP has taken steps to make them pay. Commerce describes it as an "inaugural successful collaboration" and the Acting Assistant Secretary for Enforcement and Compliance says "we will continue to work with our interagency partners". `partial` and not `done`: the Quote has a second limb — "promote policies that encourage full duty collection" — and no such policy was promulgated. Commerce's one in-window AD/CVD rulemaking on assessment (the 2025-06-04 advance request for comment on unaffiliated-reseller assessment rates and on removing CVD expedited reviews) is about which rate attaches to a reseller's entries, not about collection, and it has not been carried to a proposed rule.

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. Also Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "Enforce and Protect Act", for circumvention restricted to the Commerce Department slug, and for "duty evasion".

Adjacent action exists on the DOJ side and is leveled at #1826, but nothing records the Commerce-CBP working relationship this Quote asks for.

Corrected 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07). The 2026-08-31 pass recorded not started on the finding that “no Commerce-CBP memorandum, rule or joint announcement in the window addresses circumvention and duty evasion” and that “CBP’s EAPA process is unchanged”. The EAPA process is indeed unchanged; what changed is who uses it. Commerce became a referrer under it for the first time in its history in August 2025, and the resulting determination was announced on trade.gov on 2026-07-31. The earlier pass’s Federal Register search for "Enforce and Protect Act" was sound and found nothing, because this is an agency-to-agency referral and a CBP case determination — neither enters the Federal Register (playbook §5, “Some instruments never enter the Federal Register”). The route that finds it is trade.gov/sitemap.xml, which exists in five pages and 13,201 URLs, and the press index at trade.gov/press-releases, which lists every ITA release back to 2016 on one page.

  • Lead, not Evidence (scan triage 2026-09-06): CBP’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking Heightened Import Disclosures for Supply Chain Visibility (2026-09-02, docket USCBP-2026-1058, RIN 1685-AA47) seeks comment on party disclosures, supply-chain tracing and foreign export documentation “to more effectively detect and interdict illicit importations, especially those that are illegally transshipped to evade compliance with U.S. customs and trade laws”. It is CBP’s own rulemaking and names no Commerce role, so it does not reach the working-relationship limb; if it becomes a proposed rule on duty evasion it may bear on the second limb.
Action
other
Object
AD/CVD duty collection with Customs and Border Protection
ID
1825