Continuing change at Customs and Border Protection and big changes in Congress are two things I expect to have major influence on our industry in 2011.
Customs has acted like an agency out of control and behaved badly. We witnessed intimidation and an arbitrary abuse of power by Customs, all while the agency stumbled through yet another series of expensive failures in the Automated Customs Environment program. Efforts to increase U.S. exports were met by an enforcement mindset that made Customs a major roadblock to U.S. goods trying to make it to the world marketplace.
But that Customs is entering its second year under the leadership of a new, dynamic commissioner, we have hopes for improvement, and already are seeing changes. Commissioner Alan Bersin is not a caretaker, nor is he afraid to wrestle with an entrenched bureaucracy. The ACE Business Office announced 2011 will be a year of “strategic pause” while the agency takes stock of the problems with ACE. Recent bulletins from Customs provide important export contact information, and lines of communication appear to be opening.
All this provides new opportunities to renew and enhance the partnership between Customs and the trade.
The other big event of 2011 will be the opening of the 112th Congress, which could offer new partnerships in D.C. As President Clinton did in the 1990s, President Obama could work with a Republican-dominated Congress to pass new free trade agreements.
Can we expect an agreement with South Korea, and could there be a reversal to Congress’s failure to ratify the free trade agreement with Colombia? It is now unlikely that we will see legislation that would hand over West Coast port drivers to the Teamsters.