On December 6, 2023, U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) introduced the Resilient Communities Act in the Senate aimed at providing support to communities injured by unfair trade practices. This bill would create a centralized fund to collect and disperse customs duties collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from antidumping and countervailing duty tariffs (AD/CVD) to eligible recipients. AD/CVD tariffs are imposed by the U.S. Department of Commerce against imports of merchandise found to be priced at less than fair value or subsidized and which the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined caused injury to a U.S. domestic industry manufacturing a comparable "like product."
While AD/CVD tariffs can help impacted U.S. producers by establishing a level playing field on a going-forward basis, there is currently no legal mechanism in place to remediate the injury suffered by the domestic industry, or by extension, the surrounding community.
This new bill drawing on the $100 to $300 million dollars in annual revenue from AD/CVD tariffs collected by CBP, and would allow for "political subdivision{s} of a State in which an affected community is located" to apply for grants to distribute to "affected communit{ies}", helping to offset the harm caused by foreign producers' past predatory low-priced imports.
Eligible recipients would use these grant funds for "covered domestic producers" negatively impacted by unfairly priced imports. Priority would be given to U.S. producers determined "to be most likely to increase production and employment," as a result of the provided grant.
In the absence of any remaining covered domestic producers in the affected community, the funds may also be directed towards general "economic development" with regards to improving local "workforce development," "public infrastructure," or "improving access to health care, social services, healthy food, or education," among other areas.
The full text of the proposed legislation is available here.
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