1. 🇺🇸 MOWERS: TIME FOR BRUSSELS TO WAKE UP

EU-US Forum Board Member Matt Mowers made the case at an MCC Brussels America at 250 event on Wednesday that we need to stop the EU regulatory overreach from coming to America.

At the center of the fight: the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D). Under these policies, larger U.S. companies that operate in EU revenue are legally subject to Brussels’ supply chain and environmental mandates, regardless of whether they have a single office on European soil.

Mowers put it bluntly at the event: “They want to tell American companies where they can get their supply chain from. They want to tell American companies what kind of environmental standards they have to go for. With all due respect, looking at the outcome of output from countries like Germany and their manufacturing sector, America cannot allow Brussels to overregulate its businesses the way that, unfortunately, it’s often overregulated its own, and so America is going to stand up to those issues.”

This follows closely after China’s recent move to reject the EU’s ESG demands. Beijing issued State Council Decrees 834 and 835 with immediate effect in April 2026, explicitly shielding Chinese companies from foreign extraterritorial compliance demands, a direct counter to CSRD and CSDDD overreach. Meanwhile, the Trump White House has already issued a presidential memorandum directing agencies to defend American companies from overseas regulatory extortion.

Mowers argued in a recent op-ed that President Trump can continue protecting American companies by issuing a targeted executive order.

2. 🐄 BRUSSELS’ FORCES AMERICAN BUSINESSES TO REPORT ON THEIR COWS

Brussels has a new obsession: methane from dairy cows. The EU’s CSRD requires large companies to disclose greenhouse gas emissions in granular detail, including livestock methane across entire supply chains. And it’s not just a European problem. Non-EU companies with €450M+ in EU turnover face their own CSRD compliance deadline in 2029, meaning American dairy and food companies could soon be forced to file elaborate cow-emission reports to satisfy European regulators.

The result is a compliance nightmare exported from Europe to the American heartland, without a single vote in Congress. U.S. dairy producers could find themselves restructuring farm-level operations to satisfy EU bureaucrats, tracking methane that is notoriously difficult to measure in the first place, and bearing real costs for rules that don’t even promise real results. This is European regulatory theater, and it’s coming for American businesses, too.

❌THE DMA TAKING ITS TOLL ON EUROPEAN CONSUMERS IT PROMISED TO PROTECT

For years, critics of the EU’s Digital Markets Act warned that Brussels’ regulatory overreach would ultimately hurt the very consumers it claimed to protect. This week, in an unfortunate development for European users, those warnings came to fruition.

Just days ago, the EU ordered Meta to open WhatsApp’s API to rival AI chatbot free of charge, threatening a fine of up to 10% of global turnover if it refused – a decision the American company characterized as “regulatory overreach subsidized by the many European companies that pay.” Adding to this, Apple recently announced that its overhauled, AI-powered assistant known as Siri will be unavailable to iPhone and iPad users across the EU when it arrives later this year. This follows the Commission’s rejection of both Apple’s proposed compliance plan and its request for an 18-month phased rollout. Moreover, the company said it has no timeline for bringing the feature to European users, suggesting the burdensome nature of the DMA’s regulations for which there is often not a quick fix.

Although this may be one of the first publicly-documented consequences of the DMA for European consumers, they have long been silently paying the price, absorbing price hikes exclusive to Europe stemming from higher compliance costs on American companies.

And while Europeans users have only recently had to to grips with the negative consequences of the DMA, the ramifications have been all too painfully familiar for American firms operating there. Brussels has handed down penalties of more than $7 billion to American companies under its digital regulatory framework in just the past two years. Taking into account the $1 billion in annual compliance fees spent between U.S. companies, the total costs since 2024 exceed $9 billion.

President Trump has repeatedly made clear that the era of one-sided regulatory targeting of American companies is over. American companies shouldn’t have to choose between complying with these onerous regulations and delivering the best products to their users. Luckily, President Trump is making sure they don’t have to.