It was only exploitable by lying about the value of a shipment.
The only was you can stop that sort of loophole exploitation is by massive enforcement (i.e. large numbers of random package investigations to establish the actual value of the shipment and comparing it with the declared value).
The cost of such enforcement is very high - possibly not as high as the value of the goods imported by lying about their value, but there's actually no way to know that (since we don't know the actual value of goods that entered under the de minimis exception).
If significant parts (either in numbers or purchasing power) of your population are willing to lie to break the law, you've got problems larger and more widespread than the de minimis exception.
I'm not sure if you understand what the de minimis exception was. That's just factually incorrect.
Literally billions of dollars were getting through because they were being shipped one at a time to fulfill e-commerce type orders, which completely circumvented the spirit of the law, if not the letter.
It was absolutely a loophole. The word betrays the loophole, since de minimis is a legal term that means something is too small to matter or worry about. But it became tens of billions of dollars in merchandise.
The stated purpose of the exception was to allow individuals who are the "final destination" to import relatively low value items from overseas without the hassle and work of customs duties.
Your claim appears to be that this was abused in an organized way that led to a scale of use that was not anticipated when the exception was created. What evidence do you have for this claim?
How about the 600,000 packages daily from just Shein and Temu alone?
This isn't even remotely confusing to anyone who's bothered to look at it.
I assume you haven't done that, because you said this:
> It was only exploitable by lying about the value of a shipment.
That's not true at all. It was made perfectly legal for shipments under $800, and what was supposed to be a personal use type exemption was wildly exploited until it accounted to over 90% of all shipments to the US, and over $60bn in goods, annually. That was a mistake. Correcting it was well overdue.
The only was you can stop that sort of loophole exploitation is by massive enforcement (i.e. large numbers of random package investigations to establish the actual value of the shipment and comparing it with the declared value).
The cost of such enforcement is very high - possibly not as high as the value of the goods imported by lying about their value, but there's actually no way to know that (since we don't know the actual value of goods that entered under the de minimis exception).
If significant parts (either in numbers or purchasing power) of your population are willing to lie to break the law, you've got problems larger and more widespread than the de minimis exception.