A Bipartisan Fix, 30 Years in the Making

Bipartisan lawmaking is alive and well, at least when it comes to a dangerous but little-known loophole in America’s system for enforcing trade policy.

This flaw can be seen in the case of $14.4 million in U.S.-made aircraft parts routed via ocean carrier to sanctioned Russian airlines. Investigators cracked that case using manifest data — the detailed information about shipments moving into and out of the country. If the same parts had moved by air or land, instead of by sea, investigators would have had almost nothing to work with. Unlike ocean cargo, shipments that arrive by rail, air, and truck carry no public paper trail at all. That gap leaves U.S. supply chains increasingly vulnerable to adversarial exploitation such as sanctions evasion, narcotics trade, and the use of products produced with forced labor.    

A bipartisan fix for that gap is now moving through Congress. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Manifest Modernization Act to extend the public-disclosure rule that has long applied to ocean shipping to aircraft, truck, and rail manifests as well. A version of that fix, Section 6031 of the Senate manager’s package — the bundle of amendments Senate leaders negotiate ahead of floor consideration — is now part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. Concretely: it would require the same manifest data already made public for ships to be made public for planes, trucks, and railcars too, with personal information stripped out first.

This isn’t a new policy question. It’s a 30-year-old accident finally getting fixed. Section 431 of the Tariff Act of 1930 assumed all cargo arrived by ship — reasonable at the time. In 1996, Congress extended manifest disclosure to aircraft specifically so trademark holders could trace counterfeit goods through the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act. But a technical drafting error in a separate bill passed the same year nullified that fix, and truck and rail were never addressed.

That gap matters more now than it did in 1996 because trade patterns have shifted: air cargo and cross-border trucking now carry close to half of all U.S. import value, which means roughly half of what enters the country moves with no public visibility whatsoever. Foreign adversaries are increasingly evading sanctions, tariffs, and other controls through elaborate schemes, including transshipment through third countries that mask the true origin of goods — a problem compounded by the near-total absence of public air, land, and rail manifest data.

We know that making manifest data public is critical to addressing these threats because even the existing, partial transparency regime is helping.

Sanctions enforcement: Manifest and customs data exposed the straw-buyer networks moving Boeing- and Airbus-branded parts for Russian aircraft. Similar data exposed Venezuelan state oil exports laundered through nominally private firms into Iran and Asia.

Forced labor: Shipment records surfaced Uyghur forced labor in supply chains for seafood, refrigerators, and human hair. Much of that cargo moves by air, so enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) is effectively working with one eye closed. DHS’s own forced-labor enforcement strategy depends on traceability and supply-chain visibility; when air and land manifests are withheld from public view, the evidentiary pipeline supporting UFLPA allegations narrows.

Narcotics and organized crime: Investigators have used shipping data to trace cocaine networks; fentanyl precursors and finished counterfeits disproportionately arrive by air and express parcel — the exact modes the current law leaves invisible.

The amendment closes the modal gap without creating new burdens or new privacy risks because the manifest data is already transmitted to Customs and Border Protection under the advance electronic information requirements of the Trade Act of 2002. The provision affirmatively requires stripping Social Security numbers, passport numbers, end-consumer names, and residential addresses before any public release — business names, addresses, and identification numbers stay in, which is the entire point. Access to all manifest data would follow the model that has governed ocean manifests for decades: verified subscription access rather than an open public feed, allowing interested parties to submit a request to obtain the relevant data. By focusing on disclosure rather than collection, the government can maintain existing confidentiality protections, continuing to screen legitimately sensitive information while leaving commercial identifiers visible enough to support enforcement.

At a time when governments and industry stakeholders are investing heavily in trade-data modernization and supply-chain visibility, maintaining a transparency framework built around a single transportation mode is difficult to justify. Companies know that manifest transparency protects them from noncompliant competitors using forced labor, sanctions evasion, dumping, or counterfeit goods to gain an unfair cost advantage. And as governments increasingly view trade enforcement as a national security mission rather than simply a customs compliance matter, they are investing in new supply-chain monitoring and mapping capabilities to identify high-risk goods and actors before they become vulnerabilities in critical U.S. supply chains.

The case for greater visibility extends beyond current enforcement priorities. As the United States pursues stronger economic security safeguards — including through the ongoing U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) review — the ability to verify origin, trace high-risk inputs, and identify transshipment schemes is becoming increasingly important, yet many of the goods at the center of those negotiations move through truck and rail channels that remain largely outside the public transparency framework.

Put simply: any importer moving forced-labor goods, sanctioned components, or counterfeits has an obvious workaround today — put them on a plane, a train, or a truck. The transparency gap functions as a published guide for evasion. Congress is now positioned to fix an error it already voted to fix once before.

Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Matt Zweig is managing director for Policy at FDD Action.