The American Citizens Abroad has called on Congressional leaders in both the House and Senate to "investigate" the fact that Americans with children who live outside of the U.S. are ineligible to benefit from certain improvements to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) that their Stateside counterparts have been receiving, since July, as a result of changes introduced by the Biden administration's "American Rescue Plan" legislation earlier this year.

In what some observers are hoping could represent a significant development in the American expatriate advocacy arena, a Republican representative from Miami, who has personal experience of life as an expatriate, has joined New York Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney as a co-chair of the Americans Abroad Caucus, which Rep. Maloney recently registered in the 117th Congress.

As news broke on Tuesday that four members of the U.S. House of Representatives had co-signed a letter to House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, in which they asked that a simplified, "short form" tax return be provided to American citizens who file their U.S. taxes from abroad, some expat campaigners and advocacy organizations insisted that such a simplification would not be enough.

As U.S. members of Congress have been reluctantly working in Washington this week to attend to urgent business – instead of taking the month off, as they normally would do this time year – many are reportedly also taking the opportunity to continue to press the Biden administration to provide Covid-19 vaccines to American expats who happen to live in certain far-flung parts of the world, where such vaccines are almost non-existent. 

The U.S. State Department has reiterated that the U.S. "currently does not have plans to distribute Covid-19 vaccines to Americans overseas," according to the American Citizens Abroad, which has been calling on the government to provide vaccines directly to American expats struggling to get them in certain countries in which such vaccines are in critically short supply.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has written to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to urge him to make Covid-19 vaccines available to American expats at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, even as U.S. embassies around the world continue to state on their websites that the U.S. government "does not plan to provide Covid-19 vaccinations to private U.S. citizens overseas."

The American Citizens Abroad has written to seven top U.S. Treasury officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, to urge it to "revisit" the way President Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is affecting the small- to medium-sized businesses owned by Americans overseas – in addition to urging them to take other actions, including "the true corrective measure" of switching the U.S. to a residence-based tax (RBT) regime.

U.S. citizens currently overseas whose passports expired "on or after Jan. 1, 2020" may be able to use their expired passport "for direct return travel to the U.S." until the end of this year, the State Department announced on Monday.

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It's only when Americans move overseas that they tend to discover something that few Homeland Americans are aware of: that the U.S. is the only country in the world that taxes on the basis of citizenship rather than residency – apart from Eritrea.

Spokespeople for advocacy organizations that represent American expatriate interests – as well as many expatriates themselves – have been expressing concern over what they say appears to be a significant lack of awareness among key U.S. lawmakers of how expat taxpayers currently struggle with U.S. tax regulations, based on these lawmakers' comments and testimony during a Senate Finance subcommittee 'Tax Gap' hearing on Tuesday.