Double their funding and decrease oversight.
Interesting proposal. If licensed US customs brokers were actually part of the civil service, I would agree. As it stands: most, if not all, licensed US customs brokers work in the private sector. There are exceptions. Your local CBP office at the port of entry that you're working in or around
does staff CBP agents who are
intimately familiar with both the
Harmonised Tariff Schedule and
Title 19, Code of Federal Regulations. The CBLE is strictly off-limits to all federal employees, so those agents ain't customs brokers, however. Beyond that little detail, the problem here is threefold:
a) CBP (at least the part of CBP that actually interacts with 3PL firms and logistics providers) works a strict 9am-5pm schedule, Monday-Friday. If you're working irregular hours, late shifts, or anything along those lines, and you need to send an email to your local CBP field office for X/Y/Z (i.e. getting a stamp for a local transfer out of the terminal because your container freight station lacks access to ACE, getting further clarification on the customs status if there's some bullshit happening with bills getting deleted re-entered deleted re-entered, getting further information on customs rejects, etc), you're SOL.
b) CBP ain't the only party that you gotta worry about. "Partner Government Agencies" like the FDA, USDA, EPA, and even Fish & Wildlife get involved depending on the commodity being imported. So basically, your foodstuffs, medicines, wooden crates treated with pesticides, raw material for the manufacture of cosmetics, research samples going to a university, yadda yadda yadda. Those PGAs are also hamstrung by the M-F, 9am-5pm work week. If you get a USDA hold on a hot shipment that the customer keeps requesting updates on every hour on the hour, and that shit happens at 5:45pm... tough tits. You gotta wait until the next business day and send your email requesting follow-up. Of course... these PGAs ain't necessarily as "efficient" as US Customs at the best of times. Expect your inspector to send you a brusque email along the lines of "We are aware of your shipment, but it's not the next item in my queue. We'll get to it when we get to it."
c) This is the big one: interacting with the federal government don't mean that they're jumping at the first opportunity to service you. CBP agents have tons of other shit on their plate, as do all the other PGAs. The same CBP that you'd call the cargo field office for is also dealing with bullshit that's happening at the port of entry. Similarly, PGAs like the FDA, USDA, EPA, and such
really don't get involved with human people unless there's something that trips a flag within ACE. When human intervention
is required, the hapless stooge on the other side of the cbp.dhs.gov email address you're pinging has like a hundred other things lined up in their queue from dozens of other forwarders.
From a purely operational efficiency standpoint, there are tons of ways I can think of to streamline the process. Issue is that so much of this crap is ossified from when the foundation was first laid, with major structural changes happening like... once every other decade (
if that). If the Trump 47 administration decides to shake up CBP and related partner government agencies, I would
hope it's to maximise operational efficiency and not necessarily to resolve abstract national security concerns the way that Bush did. Oh well, what can ya do?
Minor tangent incoming, but I fucking hate how the Bush administration folded US Customs (formerly under the US Treasury) into the US Immigration & Naturalization Service, creating United States Customs & Border Protection... and then subsequently folded CBP into the then-newly-founded Department of Homeland Security. It's one of those things that happened when I was a grade school kid watching episodes of Arthur and Clifford the Big Red Dog while eating breakfast at home, so I never paid it much heed until I started working in logistics. US Customs really needs to be split part from DHS and folded back into the Treasury. It just makes more sense if the Trump administration's gonna be so aggressive with tariffs and reviving old names (i.e. rebranding DOD into the Department of War)
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