Reagan to the Rescue

It didn't take long for the Reagan Administration to get in its first swings at the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Asked about the Act at his confirmation hearing, special trade representative Bill Brock announced that he feels "very strongly the need to make some modifications in these and a number of other areas, frankly, that provide substantial impediment and sometimes absolute barriers to the ability of American workers to be competitive in some of their products overseas."

The Reagan Administration may be considering weakening another federal policy of concern to the multinationals: regulations on hazardous exports. Just six days before he left office, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order implementing a controversial hazardous substance export policy (see Monitor, November, 1980), over which his administration had struggled for two years. Reagan's trade representative Brock says one of the new administration's "highest priorities" should be to "remove obstacles which our laws and regulations place upon American exports."

Pursuing this end, the Reagan administration is abandoning Carter's procedures for implementing the legislation and is commissioning a new study of hazardous exports.