The federal government’s auditing and investigative branch will investigate the White House process for granting companies exemptions from President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.
The Government Accountability Office launched the investigation in response to members of Congress who have said the process lacks transparency and any safeguards to prevent abuse.
“GAO accepts your request as work that is within its scope of authority,” the federal agency said in a letter sent Wednesday to Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., adding it expected to have the staff to initiate the probe available in three months. The letter was responding to a bipartisan request last month for a probe by Toomey and Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Doug Jones, D-Ala.
Carper called the GAO’s decision “welcome news” and said businesses and workers alike had raised “serious concerns about this process and are looking for increased transparency and certainty going forward.”
Toomey, a critic of the tariffs, called the current process for granting exclusions “broken” and in need of reform. “I hope GAO’s review produces recommendations for fixing this flawed process so more Americans are spared from these onerous taxes,” he said.
The administration instituted tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum in March, arguing they were needed to protect domestic industries that contribute to national defense. The tariffs cover all imports, but the administration grants exclusions on a case-by-case basis if it decides that doing so wouldn’t harm “national security” — that is, because the product isn’t available domestically otherwise.
The Commerce Department told the Washington Examiner that as of Monday it had received 56,581 steel and 7,676 aluminum exclusion requests. Of those, 13,809 for steel and 918 for aluminum were granted.
The department has an estimated 100 staffers and contractors working on processing exclusion requests. The process has been slow because the tariffs are new and the department previously never had to deal with such requests.
Jones said the probe would benefit the businesses with legitimate need for exclusions because the current process is too chaotic. “This is great news for the tens of thousands of American job-creators who have been caught up in the Commerce Department’s backlog while seeking exclusions from steel and aluminum tariffs,” he said.
Other lawmakers have raised questions about the transparency and fairness of the process. In late October, Commerce Department’s Office of the Inspector General launched a probe into how the decisions were being made following complaints by lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.
