On Thursday, just before it was announced that key lawmakers hashed out an agreement to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership, US Trade Ambassador Michael Froman appeared at a Bloomberg News symposium to assure reporters that critics’ concerns about secrecy surrounding the deal were being taken into consideration.
Froman, who did not take any questions from reporters in the audience, didn’t say the details of the plan would be publicly revealed anytime soon, but did say he has moved “to accommodate” legislators asking to see “an unredacted version, meaning that they can see what other government’s positions are in the negotiations, not just the US position.”
“We’re constantly looking for more ways to be more transparent,” he claimed at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington.
Despite the administration’s crucial need to bring sympathetic lawmakers on board the push for so-called Trade Promotion Authority–Froman made the remarks between trips to Congress—it doesn’t seem likely that the White House will win over skeptics concerned about opacity, especially considering it was just last month reaching out to them in classified settings.
“What is USTR working so hard to hide? What is the specific legal basis for all this senseless secrecy?” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, asked rhetorically on March 16. “Members expected to vote on trade deals should be able to read the unredacted negotiating text.”
Even Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio), a vociferous supporter of the TPP, could not say definitively, from the Bloomberg conference, that he is granted access to the working agreement.
“I think Ambassador Froman and the administration have provided more access than ever before,” he told The Sentinel, referring to the draft text.
A more open door policy, however–to the extent that one exists through a move to “accommodate”– might not make much of an impact on negotiations, if USTR critics from the left are to be believed.
Speaking alongside Tiberi during a panel discussion, Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), a fellow House Committee on Ways and Means member and the top Democrat on the committee, said that Froman’s office has not been responsive to his concerns about investor-state dispute resolution tribunals—special courts only open to investors claiming to be mistreated by governments.
“I want more than returning the calls,” Levin told Tiberi, in a disagreement the pair had over Froman’s responsiveness.
So-called investor-state dispute settlement tribunals are created as part of trade agreements to enforce non-discrimination policies that undergird the deals–if a party to a free trade deal is favoring domestic countries, the agreement is worthless. But as Levin pointed out, in a March 17 blog post, they are often used to enforce deregulatory rules, and not just regulations on market access.
“A number of Members of Congress, stakeholders, and academics are concerned about these developments and the possibility that ISDS could be used to undermine legitimate public interest laws and regulations,” Levin’s office wrote.
A few months ago, The Sentinel reported that Froman acknowledged to Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), without specifying, that “abuses” have occurred in investor-state dispute settlements “under agreements negotiated by other countries,” and said that previous free trade deals have had “few (or none) of the extensive safeguards being proposed in TPP.”
As TPP negotiations have advanced over the past few years, transparency has been a contentious issue. Tightly-held information about the working agreement has only been publicly released through leaks. A number of senators have asked, without receiving a definitive “yes,” to be privy to the draft agreement.
Froman’s predecessor, Ron Kirk, claimed in 2012 that negotiations had to be kept secret “to encourage our partners to be willing to put issues on the table they may not otherwise.”
He also noted, according to Reuters, that delegations last decade discussing the Free Trade Area of the Americas “were subsequently unable to reach a final agreement” after details of the working deal were published.
The FTAA, he did not note, had been protested widely–most memorably, when diplomats attempted to advance it in 2001 and 2003, in Quebec and Miami.
On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee chair and ranking member, Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) reached a deal on trade promotion authority bill—the so-called “fast track” legislation that sets the stage for an up-or-down vote on the TPP and other trade deals, when finalized. It was not greeted warmly by many left-leaning members of Congress.
“The American people deserve a fair, open and transparent debate on trade,” Rep Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Instead, Fast Track allows special interests and multinational corporations to dictate secret trade deals that benefit corporate profits while shipping American jobs overseas, especially in communities of color.”
