USTR Comments: 2026 Joint Review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)
By SBE Council at 3 November, 2025, 1:30 pm
Ambassador Jamieson Greer
United States Trade Representative
Office of the United States Trade Representative
600 17th St NW
Washington, DC 20508
Docket Nos. USTR-2025-0004 and USTR-2025-0005: Request for Public Comments and Notice of Public Hearing Relating to the Operation of the Agreement Between the United States of America, the United Mexican States, and Canada (Sept. 17, 2025)
Dear Ambassador Greer,
On behalf of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship (SBE) Council, I appreciate the opportunity to provide comments ahead of the 2026 joint review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
SBE Council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing startups and small businesses across the country.[1] We advocate for policies that strengthen innovation, investment, and competitiveness. Among these, America’s framework of intellectual property (IP) rights plays a particularly important role in incentivizing innovation across the economy and enabling small, entrepreneurial companies to compete globally.
As background, SBE Council fully supported the USMCA, as well as the trade agreement preceding it, and has been highly engaged in advocating for and supporting trade pacts and specific provisions that lower barriers, and promote market access for U.S. entrepreneurs and small businesses. Since our founding more than 30 years ago, SBE Council has remained a vigorous proponent of trade agreements given the significant opportunity for small businesses to grow through global markets.
As you prepare to review the USMCA, we urge you to ensure full implementation of its commitments, strengthen its IP provisions to ensure respect for IP rights across borders, and empower American entrepreneurs to continue leading the way in high-tech sectors.
Strong IP protections are fundamental to America’s entrepreneurial success. The exclusivity afforded by patents and other IP rights enables small firms to attract investment and undertake high-risk, early-stage research. In turn, IP rights promote both innovation and economic growth. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, IP-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, information technology, and the life sciences support nearly half of all jobs nationwide.[2]
The USMCA is a critical tool for ensuring that Mexico and Canada, two of America’s largest trade partners, respect the IP rights of U.S. businesses. Yet in recent years, both countries have taken actions — such as imposing price controls on medicines and tolerating counterfeiting and piracy — that undermine those rights, particularly in the life science sector, and distort fair competition.
The future of America’s small business community and innovation economy depends on restoring respect for, and enforcement of, IP protections across North America. To that end, we encourage USTR to make several specific updates to the USMCA to align Mexico’s and Canada’s IP policy regimes with the needs of U.S.-based businesses.
First, we urge USTR to require that all USMCA parties provide at least 10 years of regulatory data protection for biologic medicines. Regulatory data protection safeguards the technical information companies must use to prove safety and efficacy, ensuring innovators have the opportunity to earn a return on investment before competitors begin copying their products.
The Trump administration initially secured this 10-year commitment in the 2018 USMCA draft before Congress removed it due to the unfounded concerns of a small minority of House members.[3][4] In fact, restoring it would not alter U.S. law — which already provides 12 years of protection — but would increase protections in Canada and Mexico to ensure U.S. firms can earn fairer returns abroad.
We also urge USTR to ensure compliance with provisions already in the USMCA, such as patent term restoration for products whose launches are unreasonably delayed by lengthy regulatory approval processes. Patent term restoration prevents regulatory backlogs from eroding patent life, bolstering companies’ ability to attract prospective investors.[5] While patent term restoration is already required by the USMCA, Mexico has yet to enact domestic legislation supporting it, and while Canada has done so, few patents currently qualify. USTR could resolve this by insisting on verifiable compliance from both countries to guarantee that innovators are not penalized for government inefficiencies. Also, Mexico is not complying with its USMCA IP commitments to effectively enforce patents and provide regulatory data protection.
Relatedly, USTR would be wise to use this opportunity to strengthen enforcement of IP rights violations, such as counterfeiting and piracy, that are currently only weakly enforced in other countries. Mexico, in particular, has been spotlighted in USTR’s Special 301 Report Priority Watch List for inadequately protecting against counterfeiting, piracy, and theft of IP related to pharmaceuticals and digital products.[6]
Finally, USTR should ensure that trade partners do not undermine IP protections through de facto price controls and reimbursement caps, which are common in Canada as a means of artificially and unfairly reducing drug prices to the disadvantage of American companies and workers. When Canada or Mexico suppresses prices through regulation while benefiting from U.S. inventions, they effectively shortchange American innovative firms of fair compensation.
While many of these provisions pertain specifically to medical innovation, their importance extends across the economy. When governments signal that IP rights in one sector can be overridden or ignored, it dampens investor confidence across all sectors, discouraging the entrepreneurship and risk-taking that drive American economic growth.
By securing stronger IP commitments from Mexico and Canada during the 2026 joint review, USTR can help realize President Trump’s original intent for the USMCA — to ensure that our trading partners uphold “a standard of [IP] protection similar to that found in U.S. law” — and provide entrepreneurs and small businesses with the support they need to continue building the next generation of American innovation.[7]
Sincerely,
Karen Kerrigan, President & CEO
[2] https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/economic-research/intellectual-property-and-us-economy
[3] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44981/R44981.25.pdf#page=22
[4] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF11391/IF11391.2.pdf#page=2
[5]https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/HTML/IF11314.web.html#:~:text=USMCA%20requires%20adjustments,whichever%20is%20later.
[6] https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/Issue_Areas/Enforcement/2025%20Special%20301%20Report%20%28final%29.pdf#page=6
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