The House of Representatives will likely vote this week on the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, after the Senate passed the bill 86–11 in August. The bill seeks to put more economic pressure on Russia due to its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, including by increasing tariffs on countries buying Russian energy products. Whether this effectively squeezes Russia indirectly—an assessment best left to national security experts—this grant of authority would result in a major tax hike for Americans.

Section 113 of the bill directs the president to increase the duty rate on every good from the five largest buyers of Russian crude oil or natural gas that continue purchasing after the bill’s enactment, as well as countries found to be helping Moscow evade oil sanctions, to up to 100 percent. As we’ve previously explained, one problem with the bill is that it does not specify how to construct the official list of targeted countries, thus giving the president wide authority to pick and choose new US tariff targets. Nevertheless, we can get an idea of the magnitude of the president’s new unilateral tariff powers by examining historical import volumes from the five countries most likely to top the crude list—China, India, Türkiye, Slovakia and Hungary. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.