WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA) today praised Senator Bill Cassidy’s Home Market Restoration Act of 2026, which establishes tariff-rate quotas and duty increases across a range of imported farm and seafood products — shrimp, honey, crawfish, rice, catfish, lamb, cattle, and beef. CPA singled out three features that correct flaws U.S. trade law has carried for the better part of a century. This bill serves as a critical marker as the United States and Mexico begin agricultural discussions as part of the USMCA review process.
1. Specific tariffs — and, crucially, indexed to inflation.
The bill sets specific, per-unit duties — for example, $1.68/kg in-quota and $6.55/kg above quota on beef, and $2.76/kg and $11.02/kg on lamb and goat meat — rather than relying on percentage rates alone. And in a provision CPA called long overdue, Section 203 adjusts those dollar duties for inflation every year.
“America’s tariff schedule is littered with specific duties still priced in 1930 dollars, and inflation has quietly repealed most of them,” said CPA President Jon Toomey. “This bill does the obvious thing Washington has neglected for a hundred years: it indexes the duties so they hold their value. Every specific tariff in the U.S. schedule should be written this way.”
Charles Benoit, CPA’s Trade Counsel, put numbers to the problem: “A duty fixed at a few cents a pound when Herbert Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley is a rounding error today. The in-quota duty on imported beef is 4.4 cents a kilogram — about two cents a pound — while the 1930 beef duty of six cents a pound would be worth roughly $1.19 a pound in today’s money. Indexing the rates to inflation ends that slow-motion erosion.”
2. Tariff-rate quotas whose over-quota rate is actually protective.
A tariff-rate quota only works if exceeding the quota costs something. Today it often doesn’t. The current over-quota duty on imported beef — 26.4 percent ad valorem — works out to roughly 60 cents a pound, and foreign suppliers are blowing straight through the quota. The bill replaces that with a specific over-quota rate of $6.55 per kilogram (about $2.97 a pound) that restores the quota’s purpose.
“A quota is only as good as the penalty for exceeding it,” Toomey said. “Brazil fills its low-duty U.S. beef quota in a matter of weeks, then ships several times that amount over the top — paying the 26.4 percent and still setting record after record. That’s a toll, not a wall. This bill finally sets an over-quota rate that makes the quota mean something.”
3. Timely as agriculture enters the USMCA review.
The bill applies duties and firm quotas to Canadian and Mexican beef and cattle, which today enter the United States in unlimited quantities, duty-free, under the USMCA. That comes precisely as agriculture moves onto the table in the USMCA Joint Review: in their June 18 joint statement, the U.S. Trade Representative and Mexico’s Secretariat of Economy announced that their teams had “began conceptual discussions on agriculture,” with the next round of negotiations set for Mexico City next month.
“Agriculture is finally on the USMCA table, and Congress is signaling the direction of travel,” Toomey said. “American ranchers cannot rebuild the herd while Canada and Mexico enjoy unlimited, duty-free run of our market. This bill plants a marker for the negotiators: the home market comes first. Do not trade away one producer’s home market for another producer’s exports.”
CPA urged the Senate to advance the legislation and pledged to work with its authors to refine and strengthen it.
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