On August 31, Politico’s “Weekly Trade” newsletter flagged a wrinkle in the recent metal tariff pronouncements: In early June, President Trump issued a proclamation adjusting the Section 232 “national security” tariffs to cut rates to 15 percent on a small list of agricultural machinery, including all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). Utility-terrain vehicles (UTVs)—effectively the same machinery except UTVs are enclosed and contain a cargo bed used by farmers and ranchers to move feed, fencing, and tools across ground a pickup truck cannot handle—were left at the full derivative rate of 25 percent.

During the first Trump administration, American firms could request tariff relief under an exclusions process. Although slow, relatively opaque, and tilted toward domestic producers who filed objections, at least the process existed. This time, the Trump administration’s Commerce Department (DOC) created an inclusion process that lets domestic producers and their trade associations sweep more downstream products into the “national security” tariffs. One action in August 2025 added more than 400 tariff lines.

This blog was updated at 1:10 p.m., Sept. 1. 

As the United States, under President Donald Trump, endeavors to coerce international trading partners through economic leverage to address both its trade and non-trade concerns, those trading partners are increasingly simply circumventing the United States. 

On April 2, 2025, not long after beginning his second term, President Trump, in violation of international trade law and US treaty commitments as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), announced steep and sweeping global tariffs on imported products from nearly all countries. He called them his “Liberation Day” tariffs. They were only the beginning. More and more tariffs have since been applied by the US, both globally and on individual countries and their products, even as some of Trump’s supposedly “reciprocal” tariffs have been overruled by the Supreme Court. 

Read the rest of this post →

Earlier this month, the United States Senate overwhelmingly passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The bill now heads to the House for consideration. The bill’s tariff title requires the president to impose duties of up to 100 percent on all goods from three sets of countries: the five largest importers of Russian crude oil; the five largest importers of Russian natural gas; and countries facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion. 

Our Cato colleague Scott Lincicome and Packard recently argued in The Washington Post that the bill’s tariff provisions are deeply misguided given how President Trump has abused other tariff statutes during his time in office, and Packard raised similar concerns with the bill in a Cato blog post last month. One criticism deserves more attention than it receives: the bill does not specify what data determines which countries make the list. 

Read the rest of this post →

Writing in the fall issue of American Affairs, Rep. Riley Moore (R‑WV) argues that American deindustrialization was a choice—that Washington refused to protect the steel industry and that a West Virginia steel mill and others like it died because of choices made by policymakers. He proposes much higher tariffs, direct federal investment through a new industrial bank modeled on the Development Finance Corporation, the enactment of the Defense Production Act to speed up permitting, and a requirement that the Defense Department buy more specialized domestic steel.

History supports neither the argument nor the remedy. Protection has virtually never been withheld from the steel industry. It was granted continuously for six decades, and the legacy mills declined anyway.

The US manufacturing sector has been on a nice run in 2026, and some Trump administration officials and protectionist pundits are crediting the president’s tariffs. In my new column for The Dispatch, I detail why we should doubt the pro-tariff story. In particular, both “soft” data (surveys) trumpeted by the administration and “hard” data on output, capacity, and utilization indicate that the sector’s recent growth is owed to other, nontariff factors and, if anything, would be even better without all the import taxes.

Fifty percent tariffs on a range of imports from Canada are set to take effect on August 19. President Trump announced the tariffs, which would be levied under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, on July 20 as a means to address discrimination by Canada and its provinces against American exports of dairy products, alcoholic beverages, and motor vehicles. Though the announcement of these duties—given their limited scope and the foreign practices they are aimed at—appeared to amount to a negotiating tactic ahead of bilateral talks with Canada on extending the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), their forthcoming imposition carries significant risks for the future of US trade policy that extend beyond these specific duties. In a worst-case scenario, Section 338 could become the next presidential “tariff button,” wielded much as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) was in 2025 and early 2026, before the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating its use to tax imports. Congress should quickly step in and repeal this outdated statute.

Section 338 authorizes the president to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on imports from a country that: a) imposes “any unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation” on a product from the United States that is not equally enforced on like products from every foreign country, or b) discriminates, through its laws, regulations, and/​or practices against the commerce of the United States and, thereby, places it at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the commerce of any other foreign country. On the latter precondition, the statute’s definition of what may constitute a discriminatory practice is broad, citing “any customs, tonnage, or port duty, fee, charge, exaction, classification, regulation, condition, restriction, or prohibition” as instances thereof. As he has done with previous tariffs imposed through other statutes, President Trump is using the broad language in Section 338 to justify this next round of duties.

Read the rest of this post →

More than eight years after President Trump dusted off Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to tax US imports of steel and aluminum, no one should be surprised to hear that the president has stretched the meaning of “national security” in the statute (or lack thereof) to impose tariffs on a widening array of products of dubious national security relevance. Since March 2018, the Trump administration has extended the steel and aluminum duties to cover a vast array of steel and aluminum “derivatives” (i.e., products made using these metals) and imposed additional “national security” tariffs on imports of automobiles and auto parts; copper and copper derivatives; timber, lumber, and their derivatives; medium- and heavy-duty trucks, parts thereof, and buses; semiconductors; and pharmaceuticals. (Additional “national security” tariffs on polysilicon and its derivatives are set to go into effect on December 4.) 

Yet, perhaps more concerning than this headline expansion in “national security” protectionism is the administration’s move to extend the Section 232 tariffs to cover products that the average American would struggle to connect to the nation’s defense imperatives. For instance, the administration deems refrigerators, washing machines, and air-conditioning (AC) units to be steel derivatives and kitchen cabinets, sofas, and couches to be timber/​lumber derivatives, thus levying a 25 percent tariff on imports of these products. Table 1 lists these and other ridiculous examples of nondefense-related products subject to (or soon to be subject to) Section 232 tariffs. Under the guise of protecting and reinvigorating manufacturing industries whose output includes defense and critical infrastructure–related products, the administration is taxing everyday items, even if the mere suggestion that such products pose a threat to the nation’s safety is ludicrous.