[CTC] Wyden says he went to top White House officials with digital trade concerns

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Wyden says he went to top White House officials with digital trade concerns
Inside US Trade
By Oliver Ward | December 6, 2023
Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-OR) met with top White House officials last month to express frustration with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s decision to withdraw U.S. support for key digital trade measures at the World Trade Organization, he told Inside U.S. Trade this week.

In late October, USTR announced <https://insidetrade.com/node/178191> that the U.S. would suspend its longstanding support for trade rules to preserve cross-border data flows and prevent governments from requiring data localization and source code disclosures. The move has drawn mixed responses; several progressive lawmakers welcomed the decision as a triumph of government oversight over “Big Tech” companies, while others – including Wyden and several other Finance members <https://insidetrade.com/node/178527> – complained that the U.S. was abdicating its leadership shaping the global digital economy and was granting adversaries additional rulemaking influence.  

When asked whether he had heard from the White House or USTR since the announcement, Wyden said that he had met with Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to discuss the issue. Wyden’s office confirmed the meeting took place at the White House on Nov. 1.

Wyden says he told the officials he believes the decision to withdraw U.S. support for the digital trade provisions was “a tremendous mistake.”

“To move away from free flow of information, protecting against forced localization, against economic discrimination, I just think it's malpractice to move away from those provisions,” Wyden told Inside U.S. Trade. The senator did not cite any conversations with USTR on the subject and his office did not respond to a follow-up request on whether he had heard from the agency on the issue.

Senate Finance ranking member Mike Crapo (R-ID) told Inside U.S. Trade on Tuesday that he had not been in touch with USTR since the decision.

“We’ve sent letters,” he said, but added that he has not received a response.

Amanda Critchfield, Crapo’s communications director on the Senate Finance Committee, also confirmed that the senator had not had any conversations with the White House on the issue, unlike Wyden.

Last week Wyden, Crapo and 30 other senators wrote to President Biden <https://insidetrade.com/sites/insidetrade.com/files/documents/2023/nov/wto2023_1051a.pdf> urging the administration to reverse the WTO decision and launch a consultation process involving federal agencies, the public and Congress to find a “consensus” position on the issue. A coalition of more than 40 major business groups <https://insidetrade.com/node/178316> also wrote to Sullivan and Brainard with their concerns in the wake of the decision.

John Murphy, senior vice president for international policy at the Chamber of Commerce, one of the groups that participated in the letter to Sullivan and Brainard,told reporters last month <https://insidetrade.com/node/178370> that the decision had not been “well-vetted” and suggested that several other U.S. agencies were “protesting” the decision behind the scenes.

USTR did not respond to a request for comment from Inside U.S. Trade on whether it had been in contact with the senators and other lawmakers since the WTO move.

Crapo and Wyden’s comments came the same day as House Ways & Means trade subcommittee members Suzan DelBene (D-WA) and Darin LaHood (R-IL), co-chairs of the House Digital Trade Caucus, lamented USTR’s lack of engagement with Congress on the issue.  

“It is unfortunate when the administration pulled out on digital trade in these areas, that there wasn't consultation with Congress on that,” DelBene said on Politico’s Tech podcast <https://www.politico.com/podcasts/tech>, arguing that “this should be a collaborative effort.”

“To have strong, long-term policy, Congress needs to be involved,” she added.

During the conversation with Politico, LaHood suggested that USTR Katherine Tai may not be responsible for decision-making around digital trade policy.

“On the digital, I'm not always sure she's the one making the decisions, I think a lot of it's done internally within the White House, and maybe being directed with a different agenda on that,” LaHood said.

USTR did not respond to a request for comment by press time; the agency has repeatedly said it consulted with Congress and other stakeholders on digital trade policy.

In an Oct. 24 statement from spokesman Sam Michel on the decision to withdraw its support for the digital trade provisions, USTR argued that the proposals could hinder domestic policymaking and that it wanted to provide sufficient “policy space” for regulatory debates to unfold in Congress.

But LaHood argued that Congress had already indicated its support for the measures in its passage of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement with bipartisan approval.

“If you look at the digital chapters of USMCA, which we did pass in a bipartisan way, and you look at how we treated digital there in terms of competition, in terms of preventing protectionist data flows, localization restrictions and prohibiting web blocking, we advanced that in a very bipartisan way through the USMCA,” he said. “And I would argue those digital chapters as a part of that should be the formula moving forward and should be embraced by the administration.” -- Oliver Ward (oward at iwpnews.com <mailto:oward at iwpnews.com>)


Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20231207/abfe3bfa/attachment.htm>