The early "misstep" and some astonishing facts about import/export

In the first months of the Covid-19 outbreak — when U.S. hospitals faced a critical shortage of protective gear and exposed front-line medical workers to needless risk — hundreds of tons of medical face masks were loaded onto planes at U.S. airports and flown to China and other destinations for foreign buyers.

[...]

While the Trump administration moved slowly to secure needed supplies, some in the Commerce Department even encouraged the export of masks as the disease spread.

The full scale and scope of what happened — including the types of masks shipped, prices, and the destinations for the shipments — are still shrouded in mystery. That’s because detailed disclosures of the airlifts are hidden from public view by the federal government. U.S. Customs and Border Protection only allows public disclosure of detailed cargo data for shipments sent and received by sea, not by air.

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Many countries, including Russia and China, allow public inspection of air freight cargo manifests, which include product details, the size of shipments, unit prices, and the destination for cargo. The U.S., on the other hand, does not.

  Intercept

And just why is that?

Little-known political maneuvering by the airline industry and its lobbyists on Capitol Hill, which slipped a provision designed to override disclosure requirements into a 1996 law on tariffs.

“Thanks to lobbying from the airline industry, U.S. air freight data isn’t public. In times of crisis, key supplies are almost universally shipped via air freight,” said William George, an analyst with ImportGenius, an import-export business intelligence firm.

And which Congress critters' pockets were lined for that?

In a technical correction bill passed in October 1996 with little debate, a provision was added to attempt to delete the previous air freight disclosure requirement in the ACPA.

But the legislative text amended the wrong bill, leading to awkward phrasing left in the federal statute. The current Tariff Act, which has gone through nearly a century of revisions, currently contains a typo, with the phrase “vessel vessel” because of the incorrect legislative text of the October revision.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Sharon Yamen, an associate professor at Western Connecticut State University who has studied the issue and currently serves as counsel to the Panjiva-ImportGenius lawsuit, told The Intercept that a plain reading of the law still shows that air freight manifests must be disclosed.

“They amended off the original language and not the amended language from July,” said Yamen. “If you look at the actual statute itself, there is a footnote noting that it was amending incorrectly.”

The original argument by the airline industry, that disclosure of air freight manifests requires a higher level of scrutiny, she added, “falls flat.”

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“Ultimately the reason they gave for the October amendment was because someone stated it was in the interest of security which was a false argument because our waterborne shipping ports are less secure than our airports,” Yamen said. “Anything can come in on a shipping container.”

[...]

Little-known political maneuvering by the airline industry and its lobbyists on Capitol Hill, which slipped a provision designed to override disclosure requirements into a 1996 law on tariffs.

“Thanks to lobbying from the airline industry, U.S. air freight data isn’t public. In times of crisis, key supplies are almost universally shipped via air freight,” said William George, an analyst with ImportGenius, an import-export business intelligence firm.

[...]

Rick Bright, a federal whistleblower, testified in May that federal agencies failed to take action to obtain masks as alarm bells went off about the Covid-19 pandemic. “We should have been doing everything possible, placing orders early, ramping up supply,” said Bright, who formerly served as a director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an agency devoted to responding to pandemics.

[...]

In the first three months of this year, exports of masks and personal protective equipment from the U.S. to China grew more than 1,000 percent compared to the same period from last year. But beyond aggregate totals, little is disclosed, making a full accounting of the global PPE trade difficult to grasp.

Trade experts say that acute shortages of medical supplies could be limited in the future with a timely review of emergency medical equipment during the export process.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.