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Aime Williams in Washington and Andy Bounds in Brussels
Donald Trump is planning to scale back some tariffs on steel and aluminium goods as he battles an affordability crisis that has sapped his approval ratings ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The US president hit steel and aluminium imports with tariffs of up to 50 per cent last summer, and has expanded the taxes to a range of goods made from those metals including washing machines and ovens.
But his administration is now reviewing the list of products affected by the levies and plans to exempt some items, halt the expansion of the lists and instead launch more targeted national security probes into specific goods, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The people said trade officials in the commerce department and US trade representative’s office believed the tariffs were hurting consumers by raising prices for goods such as pie tins and food and drink cans.
Trump’s tariff blitz has pushed US duties to their highest level since before the second world war. But the president has repeatedly walked back some of his stiffest levies amid voter anger at the US’s affordability crisis.
More than 70 per cent of US adults rate economic conditions as fair or poor, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. About 52 per cent of Americans think Trump’s economic policies have made conditions worse.
The administration has already provided carve-outs for popular food products in a bid to tame grocery price inflation for ordinary Americans. It also called a truce in its trade war with China after Beijing retaliated with its own tariffs.
The move to soften the steel and aluminium tariffs, which were among the earliest introduced in Trump’s second term, comes as economists say that Americans are paying for the levies, undercutting the president’s claim that foreign companies would bear the burden.
Trump’s trade war has also brought political backlash, even from some allies.
On Wednesday, members of Trump’s own Republican Party joined Democrats as the US House of Representatives voted to overturn Trump’s tariffs on Canada — delivering a major rebuke of his trade war on the US’s second-biggest trading partner. Trump is expected to veto the bill, leaving the levies in place.
Several Republican lawmakers face tough election battles in their home states in November’s midterm elections amid voter anxiety about the impact of tariffs on small businesses and consumers.
The latest move on the metals tariffs is also designed to bring clarity to an increasingly complicated lobbying process in Washington that has emerged since Trump imposed the levies.
The administration has so far largely allowed US businesses to lobby for products made of steel and aluminium made by rival foreign producers to be hit with tariffs, in a so-called inclusion process.
The process has been run by the commerce department, which has mostly approved the requests from domestic companies, which have cited the “national security” risks associated with goods including bicycle parts.
But the mechanism has led to a sprawling list of household goods subjected to tariffs of up to 50 per cent on their metal content.
Officials felt the tariff regime was “too complicated to enforce”, one person said, and needed to be simplified.
Countries including the UK, Mexico and Canada as well as EU members could stand to benefit from any easing of the US’s tariffs on goods made of steel and aluminium.
One European business leader, who declined to be named, said they knew of a company that had sent four identical containers of machinery to the US and was charged different rates for each one.
The commerce department last offered US companies an opportunity to nominate foreign suppliers to be hit with tariffs in October, but blew past its own 60-day deadline to greenlight new levies.
As part of that round, American manufacturers of mattresses, cake tins and bicycles all lobbied for extra duties on foreign businesses.
“Steel is not just a commodity, it is a national security asset,” said Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute.
“It is critical that the US government maintain the Section 232 national security steel tariffs, said Dempsey, who added they “are essential to prevent this overcapacity from fuelling new surges of harmful imports into the US market, which would cause a profound threat to American national security and undermine the health of the American steel industry”.
The close to 100 filings underscore the broad range of items that companies are now arguing pose a national security risk to the US.
One company argues in its filing that “without bread, buns, baguettes, crusty rolls, cakes, muffins and the ”, soldiers in the US military “will not be able to maintain a healthy diet”.
The commerce department, the US trade representative’s office and the White House all declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Ilya Gridneff
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