US Republican Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana has introduced a bill that would take $36 million (€33 million) from the US Treasury and put it towards the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) to increase audits of imported shrimp and red snapper.
The bill, which was introduced to the Senate in December, has been referred to the US Senate's Committee on Finance.
The sparsely-worded measure said the money could be taken from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as part of the inflation reduction act.
In recent months the US government has honed in on shrimp imports as being problematic for domestic shrimp producers.
Last month the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) made an affirmative preliminary determination regarding antidumping and countervailing duty petitions filed by the American Shrimp Processors Association (ASPA) on imports of shrimp from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
The commission, in a unanimous vote of 4-0, determined "there was a reasonable indication that the domestic industry is materially injured or threatened with injury by imports from the four countries."
SIMP took effect in 2018 and established reporting and record-keeping requirements for imports of certain seafood products to prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated and/or misrepresented seafood from entering the US market.
It already monitors imports of red snapper and shrimp, but officials recently declined to expand the program to cover other species.
