What the US can learn from Brexit as it cuts de minimis exemption

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One suspects customs formalities were not at the forefront of the White House administration’s mind when it announced plans to kibosh the de minimis exemption that permitted unimpeded flows of goods valued at less than $800 into the US.

Nor is it particularly surprising that this may slip its mind – it’s pretty dull.

But for veterans of the UK’s departure from the EU, customs formalities are something of a trigger and, given the two-year timeframe President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” has set to end the exemption globally, forwarders and brokers will need to prepare.

Unlike with Brexit, US logistics operators at least know exactly what they will be contending with.

Like Brexit, though, the issue appears glaringly obvious: government failure to consider how – and perhaps more importantly who – would be handling the formalities that this wave of additional customs declarations will provoke.

From the off, UK forwarders and customs experts urged big spending to train somewhere in the region of 50,000 additional agents, with expectations that annual declarations would likely leap from 50m to 300m.

In response, the government pumped in an initial £8m – sufficient to fund the costs of training some 3,500 out of the 50,000 needed, just 7%.

Oxford Economics reckons 22,000 additional agents will be needed in the US, but this presumes the US CBP is already sufficiently staffed; it isn’t; that same report from last year suggested it was contending with a shortfall of 5,000.

As to the funding, if a political decision taken by a government provokes the sudden need for a major surge of workers in a particular role, it may be wise for that government to provide funds, or loans, to cover the training.

The White House could learn from the UK’s mistakes and consider amending its timeframe.

It takes around two years to train a customs agent. The US was already dealing with a shortage of brokers before scrapping the de minimis exemption for goods from China and Hong Kong on 2 May.

That saw the volume of de minimis goods into the country drop from millions to hundreds of thousands.

A week on from the passage of the ‘Beautiful Bill’, time is ticking down before the rest of the world finds its de minimis exemption ended, but there is little to suggest that either the administration or industry is looking to fill those vacancies.

Sources say that the general thinking is that AI can do the job.

Experts say this is simply not the case. One told The Loadstar that “AI can enable people to process declarations faster”, but given peculiarities and individualities of declarations, AI is not capable of replacing people.

What is needed is people, and people that need to be trained, and that takes time.

Will industry pay? Perhaps not, when government decisions appear to be made so haphazardly.

Because industry has to consider the possibility that if it all goes tits up, any unilaterally imposed policy may be rolled back.

You only have to look at Brexit to realise that.