alt Hacker NewsThe US idiocy was to whiplash de minimis regulations. The US gov't suddenly raised the de minimis threshold to $800; with the easily foreseeable effect that the country got flooded with crap from Temu; and then reacted by eliminating de minimis completely.
If they'd just kept the threshold at $200, all the chaos could have been avoided...
To my mind, the increase from $200 to $800 was more of a pragmatic policy tweak than a change of course. It was a recognition that US customs had limited capacity to check the value of small packages.