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President Trump has been reshaping his trade policy since the Supreme Court ruled against a raft of tariffs months ago. Just yesterday, the president announced new duties on more than 80 countries. That's after weeks of threatening to and actually levying other new fees on imports to the U.S. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben reports on Trump's rebuilt tariff regime.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: On February 20, the day the Supreme Court struck down his tariffs, President Trump made it clear that he was determined to enact more tariffs anyway.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But other alternatives will now be used to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives. Great alternatives.
KURTZLEBEN: Alternatives referred to laws the administration might use after the court said tariffs under the president's preferred route, a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, were unlawful. Since then, the administration has used several of those alternatives, including with a flurry of tariff activity this week.
The president imposed 50% tariffs on some Canadian goods to start in just under a month. To impose those, he invoked a 1930 law that has never been used for tariffs before. The administration said those were to counter Canada's own retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., though Trump had also recently floated tariffing Canadian goods as a form of payback amid Canada's wildfires, which he said were poisoning U.S. air.
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TRUMP: You know, we got to stop the fires up there. If we can help them, we'll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.
KURTZLEBEN: The administration also this week effectively replaced an expiring global 10% tariff with a new set of fees of 10 and 12.5% on goods from all of the country's biggest trading partners. They're imposing these under a law that allows the U.S. to tariff to counter, quote, "unfair" trade practices. The administration accused all of those major trading partners of importing goods made with forced labor. Not everyone believes that's a good faith explanation. Here was Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden at a trade hearing this week.
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RON WYDEN: Trump's next trade scheme is ordering USTR to reconstruct his illegal global tariffs under the guise of addressing forced labor.
KURTZLEBEN: And in addition, the president this week on social media threatened future tariffs on pharmaceuticals, using still another law aimed at protecting national security. Especially compared to pre-Trump levels, all these tariffs add up.
ROBERT MCCLELLAND: Prior to this administration, average tariff rates were on the order of 2%.
KURTZLEBEN: Robert McClelland is a senior fellow who tracks tariffs at the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. He found that the average tariff rate spiked to more than 17% for a few weeks last year. This year, things have moderated some.
MCCLELLAND: When the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA tariffs weren't unconstitutional, the average rate fell from 13-ish percent to about 10.5%, 10%.
KURTZLEBEN: That's roughly where it is now, lower than at its peak, but far higher than pre-Trump levels. Behind that 10% average rate is a patchwork of tariffs on individual goods like aluminum, lumber and semiconductors, and individual countries like Brazil. And they're all instituted using multiple statutes known to trade experts by three-digit numbers - 122, 338, 232, 301 - for the sections of laws being invoked. All these tariffs under all these laws could make life harder for American businesses. Kathleen Claussen is a law professor at Georgetown University.
KATHLEEN CLAUSSEN: It has created a much more complex landscape with all of the three digits going at once and having to figure out - do they add? Do they - how does one fit with the other? What are the exceptions? Da, da, da. It is a far more complex landscape, I think, than it was a year ago.
KURTZLEBEN: An array of tariffs under all those laws means potential legal challenges. Alex Durante is a senior economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation, who also worked on the first Trump Administration's Council of Economic Advisers. He expects legal challenges against the tariffs, and that the administration is scrutinizing trade law as a result.
ALEX DURANTE: I think the government is going to perhaps really try, I think, you know, more so than they have in the past, to kind of really nail down, like, what was actually the intention of these authorities? Like, what does the statutes say?
KURTZLEBEN: The Trump administration's central argument for the tariffs is that they'll have long-term economic benefits, primarily boosting manufacturing. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer put it this way at a Senate hearing this week.
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JAMIESON GREER: The problems the president's trade policy seeks to solve are generational. These things were not broken in a day, and they won't be fixed overnight. But they must be fixed.
KURTZLEBEN: The manufacturing boom has not come yet. Employment in the sector remains below where it was when Trump took office. And while the administration has reported large foreign investment pledges as a result of trade agreements, it's still not clear how big they'll be or what they'll yield. That means committing to tariffs is a political gamble. Trump is asking voters to weigh a policy they may dislike now against what might happen in the future.
Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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