Indiana Sen. Todd Young and Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith reintroduced bipartisan legislation in February focused on improving the U.S. trade remedy system and responding to repeat trade offenses.
The bill, called the Leveling the Playing Field 2.0 Act, is especially focused on responding to China’s trade practices. The U.S had a total trade deficit of $295.4 billion with China in 2024.
Soon after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his trade policies ignited another trade war with China. Recently, Trump imposed 20% tariffs on Chinese goods. Young and Smith’s bill, one IU expert said, can be interpreted as an alternate response to China’s trade practices.
"The Leveling the Playing Field Act 2.0 will protect American workers and combat China’s unfair trade practices,” Young said in an email to the Indiana Daily Student.
The original Leveling the Playing Field Act was written into law in 2015, and this successive act seeks to build on currently implemented trade remedy laws by introducing the concept of “successive investigations.” These investigations are an attempt to combat repeat offenders of the World Trade Organization’s anti-circumvention standards, namely antidumping and countervailing duty measures.
Several institutions including the U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Commission and Customs and Border Protection are involved in investigating trade offenses. The results of the investigations could mean importing countries pay additional fees, or tariffs, on their traded imports.
Antidumping is a law that allows governments to impose tariffs on products they believe are priced unfairly below market value, or products that are being “dumped” in their nation’s market.
Mostafa Beshkar, associate professor of economics at IU, said antidumping especially applies to imports from anti-competitive industries like the steel industry.
“The argument here is that foreign producers of steel charge prices that are unreasonably low in the U.S.,” Beshkar said about the bill’s dumping allegations. “Their objective is basically to kill the local or domestic steel producers so that they can monopolize the market later.”
The steel industry is a central focus of the bill because, according to a press release from Young, about half of “unfair trade cases” in the U.S. are in the steel industry. Indiana received about $229 million of steel and iron imports from China in 2024, according to an IDS analysis of data from the World Institute for Strategic Economic Research.
Countervailing duty is another remedial law that allows tariffs for imported goods. The law counters subsidies from the exporting country.
“They (exporting countries) subsidize exports intentionally to basically help their firms penetrate foreign markets,” Beshkar said.
Sarah Bauerle Danzman, associate professor of international studies at IU, said countervailing duties are used by the U.S. “so that our producers are going to be able to stand a chance to compete against them (other countries) and also to try to force them to the negotiating table so that they stop unfairly subsidizing their producers in that way.”
The bill also seeks to make countervailing duty law apply to subsidies from a government provided to companies operating abroad. Beshkar said this practice, known as country hopping, includes a country exporting to a different country that then exports to the U.S. — an attempt for the original exporting country to avoid countervailing duty taxes.
Successive investigations are an attempt to expedite investigations and determinations on anti-circumvention inquiries. According to a press release from Young, new anti-circumvention inquiries currently take a long time for the U.S. Department of Commerce to initiate. The bill also aims to make it easier for people to bring new cases.
Bauerle Danzman noted that the Department of Government Efficiency does not help with the effort to speed up investigations. DOGE is an advisory board created by President Trump and led by Elon Musk in an attempt to cut U.S. government spending.
“We actually need high quality government employees doing this important work,” she said. “So if the concern is that it’s taking too long, you probably don’t want to start by firing people who are processing these types of investigations.”
Bauerle Danzman added that the bill’s concept of implementing a standard of successive investigations could be helpful for the U.S. government when responding to repeat offenders.
“If the U.S. government saw a pattern where the Chinese government was doing this (dumping), they could just basically use their previous assessment of the dumping and modify it just a little bit based off of this new information,” she said. “They wouldn’t be starting from scratch every time that there was a new concern.”
Beshkar said a problem with the bill is that China is not a market economy, and antidumping and countervailing duties are typically designed for market economies. He said this is because these measures require certain policies and a level of pricing transparency that nonmarket economies rarely implement.
“So, this bill that is proposed, I think it's not bad, but I don’t think that it’s going to solve any problem,” Beshkar said.
Bauerle Danzman said the bill is a good step forward overall, partially because of Donald Trump’s broad and shifting tariffs.
“It’s very hard for businesses that are involved in international trade to plan in that kind of environment, and so you want to have a process of making determinations around these issues that is a little bit more measured and deliberative,” she said.
This bill, she said, seems to be an attempt to provide an alternate, more fact-based process to remedy trade issues rather than implementing sweeping tariffs.
“I think that this is a way to try to give the President and give the administration a different set of tools with the hopes that they’ll use these tools rather than the kind of haphazard ones that they’re currently using,” Bauerle Danzman said.
Beshkar, on the other hand, said this bill is now “completely irrelevant” because of the 20% tariffs Trump recently imposed on Chinese goods.
Without these tariffs, he added, policies like those suggested in the bill would be more consequential. He said this is because imposing sweeping tariffs like the ones Trump has implemented “undermines the entire WTO legal framework.” During times where such broad tariffs are in place, he said, there is less basis for claiming violations under finer legal measures like antidumping and countervailing duties.
Beshkar noted that the bill seems to be an attempt to make U.S. steel producers happy. However, he said the real problem with U.S. steel production is a lack of subsidies from the U.S. given to the industry rather than dumping from other countries.
