An antitrust advocate says Congress and the next president of the United States should address the issue.

Shein and Temu have spent billions of dollars on online American advertising with social media companies such as Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, and Google to promote cheap products in their online marketplaces. Items listed for sale include beauty products for young women and girls for as low as a penny, and kids’ clothing for less than $10, well below average American direct-to-consumer merchants’ prices such as those found at Amazon and other outlets.

But they mostly avoid U.S. import tariffs on Chinese goods because the threshold for assessing such taxes is $800 or more, according to a report from the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Shein’s terms of service for U.S. consumers limit daily orders to $800.

“Chinese retailers appear to be avoiding tariffs by pricing individual units at absurdly low prices. Don’t get me wrong—low prices are the aim of a healthy, competitive market,” Robert H. Bork Jr., president of the Antitrust Education Project, told The Center Square. “But these prices are not the result of economic competition. They are the result of intentional economic warfare. As a result, they are exploiting our economy and effectively doing it tariff-free.”

This week, Commissioners Peter A. Feldman and Douglas Dziak of the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a joint statement calling for the agency to investigate the two retailers after reading in media reports “that deadly baby and toddler products are easy to find on these platforms.”

In April, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., asked U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to investigate Shein and Temu and add them to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act list of violators, as The Center Square previously reported.

“It is past time for the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to begin adding entities to the UFLPA exporter list,” Rubio said. “Private firms and journalists have unearthed compelling evidence that both Shein and Temu are facilitating the entry of goods made with Uyghur forced labor.”

The two U.S. presidential candidates on the ballot in November — former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — have said on the campaign trail they will be stricter with Chinese goods entering the country.

Bork said whoever wins the election should stick to their word.

“While inflation is hurting American companies like the Dollar Store, Chinese Communist Party-backed Shein and Temu enjoy state backing to dump cheap products on our market,” Bork said. “The next president and Congress must decide whether they actually want to enforce Chinese tariffs and close the Shein/Temu loophole, or if they want to keep the current policy of tariffs in name only.”

Rep. Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican, sent a letter Sunday to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas seeking information about the rally’s security plan, “including areas such as the building from which the shooter attempted the assassination on President Trump, communications between or among personnel at the Department of Homeland Security and the Executive Office of the President related to any potential increase or addition of protective resources to President Trump’s security detail;” and materials used to brief President Joe Biden about the assassination attempt.

“The seriousness of this security failure and chilling moment in our nation’s history cannot be understated,” Green wrote. “No assassination attempt has come so close to taking the life of a president or presidential candidate since President Reagan was shot in 1981.”

An eyewitness to the shooting told the British Broadcasting Corporation that he and others who attended the rally spotted the shooter — identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania — on the nearby building rooftop minutes before he opened fire, killing one rally attendee, seriously wounding another and striking Trump in his right ear.

The eyewitness, who BBC identified as Greg Smith, said he notified law enforcement of the gunman on the roof before the shooting took place.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking, why have they not pulled him off the stage’… the next thing you know, five shots ring out,” BBC reported.

Green said that had the bullet’s trajectory “been slightly different, the assassination attempt on President Trump might have succeeded.”

“As the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) investigates, the Committee on Homeland Security is dedicated to conducting rigorous oversight to ensure that the American people receive answers and presidential candidates receive proper and adequate protection,” Green added.

Green said that, according to the Secret Service, the shooter “fired multiple shots toward the stage from an elevated position outside of the rally venue,” raising concerns about how the shooter “was able to access a rooftop within range and direct line of sight of where President Trump was speaking.”

Green also said in the letter that some media reports indicate that DHS “’rebuffed multiple requests from President Trump’s security detail to increase protective resources in the weeks preceding this event.”

The demands to Mayorkas come after U.S. House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said Saturday night that he wanted the U.S. Secret Service director to appear for a hearing before Congress to testify about the security plans for the campaign event.