For decades, U.S. politicians have sold free trade agreements as a beacon of prosperity for the American economy. The logic was tidy: “Most of the world’s consumers live outside the U.S.—so if we open foreign markets, prosperity will follow.” On paper, it sounded plausible. But in practice, it became one of the most costly economic miscalculations in our modern history.
The Senate’s decision to remove the FEOC Excise Tax and weaken FEOC restrictions is a blatant giveaway to the Chinese Communist Party’s solar industry.
Any Senator who supports an amendment to remove or weaken the FEOC Excise Tax is directly endorsing China’s solar industry—dominated by companies using slave labor, powered by coal, and compromised by severe cybersecurity risks.
CPA strongly endorses the FEOC Excise Tax in the Senate reconciliation bill as a critical step in protecting America’s solar manufacturing industry from reliance on subsidized and compromised Chinese components.
CPA warned that the Senate version of President Trump’s reconciliation bill—known as the One Big Beautiful Bill—contains a critical loophole in both the Section 48E investment tax credit and 45Y production tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), creating an unintended but dangerous giveaway to China’s solar industry.
Some Chinese solar power inverters were allegedly found to have communication devices attached to them that were not supposed to be part of that equipment, suggesting that they can ping information back to the company’s headquarters and be used for nefarious ends, Reuters London reported on May 14.
The IPO, widely seen as the first major test of President Trump’s America First Investment Policy (AFIP), directly undermines the President’s February directive to block U.S. investment in companies linked to the Chinese military, human rights abuses, and authoritarian surveillance state.
The Department’s decision confirms what CPA has consistently warned: Chinese solar companies have been illegally circumventing U.S. trade laws through Southeast Asian shell operations, flooding the U.S. market with dumped and subsidized products directly harming the domestic solar manufacturing industry.
The Department of Defense designated CATL as a “Chinese military company” under Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act on January 7. Their concern: CATL’s advanced lithium-ion batteries may one day be used to power China’s submarine fleet, replacing older battery models.
On April 2, President Donald Trump took bold and historic action to defend American industry with the announcement of sweeping new tariffs aimed at countering unfair foreign trade practices and reigniting U.S. manufacturing. Dubbed “Liberation Day”, this policy marks the first major step in a new era of economic revitalization—one where the United States refuses to accept the systematic dismantling of its industrial base and begins to chart a path back to true production-led prosperity.
