The Trump administration will allow companies to seek one-year extensions for exclusions to tariffs on Chinese goods it granted last year.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced Monday that it will begin, starting Nov. 1, “a process for considering extending for up to twelve months certain exclusions from additional tariffs on Chinese imports that were granted last December and are set to expire on December 28, 2019.”
The tariffs in question involved 25% levies that covered $34 billion worth of Chinese goods.
The USTR has a “product exclusion request” system. An importer can request that a product be excluded from the tariffs if it can prove that there is no version available domestically. If USTR grants an exclusion, the product itself is no longer under a tariff, and nobody importing it has to pay. About a quarter of all requests for exclusions are granted, according to the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank.
The administration has placed 25% tariffs on $250 billion worth of goods and 15% tariffs on another $300 billion worth of goods, in both cases citing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974. The White House had threatened to raise the tariffs to 30% but put that on hold earlier this month when trade negotiations with Beijing resumed.
