Business groups warn that President Trump’s Saturday announcement that the White House would not impose $300 billion in new tariffs on Chinese goods does not mean that those tariffs won’t still be imposed.
The tariffs could be put in place pretty quickly should negotiations with Beijing break down, as they have in the past.
“The $300 billion list is just on hold and who knows for how long? Is it permanent or not? There is no deadline the administration has imposed on itself. It’s just a big question mark,” Sage Chandler, vice president of international trade for the Consumer Technology Association, told the Washington Examiner.
A U.S. Trade Representative’s Office spokesman confirmed that the $300 billion tariffs were still poised to be enacted. The source said that the White House has already jumped through much of the procedural hoops for it, having concluded the necessary public hearings for it last week. None of those procedural requirements will need to be done over should the White House decide to move forward with the tariffs.
Trump had previously said he would make a decision on the tariffs after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit of leading world economies, held last week in Osaka, Japan. On Saturday, he said the trade talks with Beijing were back on and that the additional tariffs would be put on hold.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CBS on Sunday that the pause in applying tariffs was just that.
“You know, the president said on tariffs, let me make this point, he said, ‘No additional tariffs for now.’ So he’s going good faith to see how these talks go, to see if China delivers on an early agriculture promise, let’s call it an early harvest, but that may be up for grabs. We will see. No one can predict with certainty,” Kudlow said.
Not knowing is a major problem for a lot of businesses, said David French, senior vice president of government relations for the National Retail Federation. It is almost as bad as having the tariffs in place since they at least plan around them.
“The administration’s approach to handling economic policy disputes with tariffs introduce a lot of uncertainty into businesses that rely on complex global supply chains, like retail,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Chandler said that several of the bureaucratic processes involved in the tariffs are still grinding forward. Officially, the government has only put up a proposed list of $300 billion in items to be hit with tariffs and it has yet to draw up the final list. Tuesday, for example, is the deadline for companies that requested exclusions from the list to rebut in writing any questions raised by federal officials regarding their requests.
“So the comment period is still officially open. And after that the administration has to review those comments and then decide what would be on the list if the tariffs were to go into effect,” she said, adding, “I assume they are working as fast as they can because the president could say at any moment, ‘Yup, the tariffs are going to be on.'”
Businesses have already seen how fast the current administration can move. “We saw that in May when the president decided to escalate $200 billion in existing tariffs to 25% (up from 10%). They were able to do that quickly because they had already checked all of the procedural boxes” previously, he said.
The other problem, French said, is that process generally only moves in one direction. While the Trump administration has paused the $300 billion in tariffs, it already has 25% tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods in place from earlier in the trade fight. The White House has pointedly refused to budge on those.
“Once tariffs are in place, they can be really hard to lift,” French said. “They may shift a little bit but it is not hard to imagine that large portions of these tariffs remain in place for a long time.”
