Comments to USTR on the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers
Docket Number USTR-2025-0016
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Public Citizen welcomes the opportunity to provide written comments to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on the 2026 National Trade Estimate (NTE) report. Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization with more than 1 million members and supporters.
At its core, the NTE report is a value judgment, a proclamation to the world about what U.S. public policy priorities are and what they are not. For years, USTR’s annual review of U.S. trade partners’ “significant trade barriers” (required by statute 19 U.S. Code § 2241) has included not just policies that explicitly discriminate against U.S. companies but has labeled a variety of other countries’ public interest policies related to public health and the environment, food-labeling and privacy laws, and even kosher and halal faith-based dietary standards as illegal trade barriers. A trade policy that prioritizes the interests of workers and consumers must be premised on what is in the public interest.
The NTE Should Not List Public Interest Policies
It is Public Citizen’s view that it is inappropriate and counterproductive both for USTR to spend resources compiling a corporate hit list of public interest measures and for USTR to effectively arm commercial interests with ammunition to attack similar U.S. domestic policies by labeling such measures categorically as trade barriers. Any broad sense of the U.S. national interest should favor other countries enforcing strong environmental, health, digital regulation, and other public interest standards.
We were thus disappointed in the changes made to the NTE Report of 2025, compared to that released by the USTR in 2024. The 2024 report marked a significant change in policy, as that report explicitly recognized that countries have “a sovereign right to adopt measures in furtherance of legitimate public purposes,” and therefore adopted a more nuanced approach to identifying barriers to trade, in particular with regard to digital trade.
For instance, the 2024 NTE Report excluded a range of digital regulations that were previously identified as barriers to digital trade, including Europe’s digital regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation and Digital Markets Act, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, and Canada’s Online News Act.
In last year’s comments, Public Citizen noted that the 2024 NTE report still listed many public interest policies as trade barriers, and therefore urged the USTR to build on the progress made in its 2025 report, which would include not just acknowledging countries’ sovereign right to regulate in the public interest, but their obligation to do so. Unfortunately, the 2025 report reverted to regurgitating the hit list of other countries’ laws that large U.S. multinational corporations dislike.
The shift in the 2025 report also marks a worrying trend that could undermine domestic efforts to hold Big Tech accountable, either by Congress, states, or regulators. Many policy priorities labeled as ‘digital trade barriers’ by Big Tech corporations are actually pro-privacy, anti-discrimination, and anti-monopoly safeguards. As governments around the world, including our own, work to regulate the rapidly changing tech space, it does not make sense to list these new regulations as ‘barriers to trade.’
Big Tech platforms may not like the various policies that the 2025 report labeled as “unclear,” “potentially restrictive” or “burdensome,” but it is not in the broader U.S. interest for our government to discourage other countries from safeguarding their populations’ privacy, personal data, and security, much less to take any actions in the “trade” sphere that foreclose U.S. policymakers’ space to enact robust digital governance measures domestically.
Continuing to regurgitate Big Tech’s hit list in the 2026 NTE Report could also prove shortsighted by spurring other countries to begin to move away from utilizing American tech services. This could have disastrous impacts on the U.S. economy. Recent attacks by the U.S. administration on digital regulations in various countries have contributed to the growth of a “digital sovereignty” narrative in countries ranging from Canada to Brazil, India to Europe. By threatening coercive actions against public policy regulations designed to hold Big Tech companies accountable for unethical and illegitimate practices, the present administration may, in fact, be encouraging countries to find alternatives to U.S.-based service providers.
We urge USTR to exclude from this year’s report digital policies like the ones below, which were inappropriately included in the 2025 report.
- Personal data protection and privacy laws in several jurisdictions, including Brazil, Chile, the European Union, India, Israel, Kenya, South Korea, Nigeria, and Norway.
- Regulations that restrict free cross-border data flows on grounds of privacy, data protection, economic sovereignty, or national security, such as South Korea’s restrictions on export of geospatial data, and regulations that limit the use of foreign cloud services proposed or implemented in multiple jurisdictions.
- Policies that require revenue sharing by large platforms with traditional media, such as Australia’s Media Bargaining Code and Canada’s Online Streaming and Online News Acts.
- Digital services and similar taxes imposed by various countries, including Canada, Colombia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Turkiye, and the UK.
- Digital competition laws such as the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, Japan’s Antimonopoly and Digital Platforms Acts, and similar legislation in South Korea.
- AI laws and regulations, such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act.
- Regulations and governance frameworks around digital public infrastructure systems, such as Brazil’s Pix and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI), as well as the regulation of digital payment systems being implemented or considered in various jurisdictions.
- Online safety and platform regulations, such as the European Union’s Digital Services Act and South Korea’s proposed online streaming related regulations.
- Local incorporation and presence requirements for large online platforms, such as in Nigeria, Turkiye, and India.
- Network usage fees being contemplated by various jurisdictions, including Brazil, the European Union, and South Korea.
While the tech industry has had a growing influence in the creation of recent NTE reports, public interest policies in a number of other sectors have also been implicated without regard to the environmental, public health, or other societal benefits they confer. Additional policies that should be removed from the report include, but are certainly not limited to, those listed below.
- Regulations on pesticides, such as the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy for alternative sustainable farming methods and Mexico’s decision to phase out glyphosate and glyphosate-containing products, such as Monsanto’s “Round-Up.”
- Regulations on veterinary medicinal products in the EU that seek to address antimicrobial resistance to ensure that exported animal products do not originate from animals treated with antimicrobial medicines reserved for human use or utilized for growth promotion.
- Environmental standards such as the EU’s forthcoming Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) regulation, scheduled to commence in 2026, which will levy charges on the embedded emissions of imported products.
- Halal certification requirements by predominantly Muslim nations, such as Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan.
- Regulations on genetically engineered (GE) food in Angola, the EU, India, Mexico, Peru, and Russia.
- Regulations concerning beef and pork products treated with beta-agonists, such as ractopamine, in the EU and Thailand, among others.
- Policies requiring heavy metal testing for cosmetics and mandating a health certificate from the country of origin for imported cosmetics in Indonesia and Kuwait, respectively.
Trade Barriers That Should Be Listed in the NTE
Since 2022, USTR has included labor and environment as new categories of trade barriers:
- Labor (e.g., concerns with failures by a government to protect internationally recognized worker rights, including through failure to eliminate forced labor, or failures to eliminate discrimination in respect of employment or occupation);
- Environment (e.g., concerns with a government’s levels of environmental protection, unsustainable stewardship of natural resources, and harmful environmental practices);
When companies abroad are permitted to abuse workers and pollute with impunity, the local community suffers, but so do U.S. workers forced to compete with a flood of imports subsidized by social and environmental dumping. U.S. companies are incentivized to offshore production to take advantage of cheap labor and lax environmental standards — or at least to threaten to do so to weaken domestic workers’ collective bargaining power. We encourage an expanded focus on these new categories, which would be in line with the original intent of the statute to name and shame policies against the public interest.
For instance, the Government of Kenya recently passed the Business Law (Amendment) Act, Act No. 20 of 2024, that would exempt U.S. technology companies from jurisdiction in Kenyan courts for legal violations caused by their business practices impacting Kenyan workers. Enabling Big Tech companies to take advantage of abusive labor conditions in foreign countries harms US-based companies engaged in similar work, harms U.S. workers by weakening their collective bargaining power, and harms Kenyan and other workers subject to the abusive business practices of Kenyan and U.S. companies. Creating a legal exemption for large U.S. technology companies incentivizes harmful business practices that undermine the benefits of digital trade for both Kenyans and Americans.
Looking Ahead
During the Biden administration, the Office of the USTR made significant progress toward correcting the harms of corporate-captured trade policy and ending problematic practices in previous NTEs. Unfortunately, the 2025 report reverted to a focus squarely on promoting and protecting the interests of big corporations rather than consumers, workers, and communities.
The interests of big corporations and the American people are not always aligned. For instance, a number of studies show the majority of Americans prefer greater regulation of tech companies.
Accordingly, we urge the USTR to re-evaluate its policy orientation by limiting the scope of the 2026 NTE Report to actual trade policies, such as tariffs, quotas, or import licensing schemes, and refraining from demonizing environmental, public health, pro-digital competition, and other legitimate public interest policies as “significant trade barriers,” especially those that treat domestic and foreign goods, firms, and services alike. The USTR must reset its trade policy to ensure that trade policy complements, rather than undermines, public interest goals.