Donald Trump opened February with the threat of a 25 percent tariff on products from Mexico and Canada, meant to convince both countries to do more to combat the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants over our mutual borders. Following commitments from both to strengthen border protection, the administration announced a 30-day reprieve—but Trump has suggested that more tariffs may be coming.
Among his other transformations of the Republican Party, Trump has fundamentally reoriented its priorities on trade. Recent Republican presidents used multilateral organizations and free-trade agreements to promote global integration. Trump instead aims to use tariffs (and the threat of tariffs) to maximize American leverage in rebalancing trade flows and supporting other policy efforts—like compelling Colombia to accept certain deportation flights.
A new House legislative proposal would empower this agenda by giving the president even more flexibility. Freshman West Virginia representative Riley Moore has rolled out the United States Reciprocal Trade Act (USRTA). The bill has already gathered several populist cosponsors, including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The USRTA’s emerging support reflects the way that the Republican coalition’s views on trade have shifted. It mirrors in many ways what Trump termed the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act” on the campaign trail last year. Trump has made trade a top priority for his new administration, and polls indicate that Republican voters, at least, might be inclined to give him some running room on the issue. A Quinnipiac poll from December found that over three-quarters of Republicans supported Trump’s proposal to place tariffs on products from Mexico, Canada, and China.
The bill’s title also reveals the shifting of trade-policy momentum. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put reciprocity at the heart of his new trade-policy agenda, which focused on building relationships with other nations. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 caused a paradigm shift in U.S. policy. It gave the president enhanced powers to arrange trade pacts and laid the foundation for the multilateral arrangements that would culminate in the World Trade Organization. It also represented a pivotal moment when Congress gave away its own power in this area. The executive would henceforth enjoy considerable latitude to set tariff and trade policy more generally.
Moore’s bill would further enhance the president’s ability to impose tariffs at his discretion. It would delegate to the president the power to raise tariffs on any nation that imposes such charges higher than the U.S. does on that nation, or on any other that the president determines has erected non-tariff barriers to American products.
The act expands the president’s surprisingly limited tariff powers. In recent trade disputes, the Trump and Biden administrations invoked emergency powers found in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the National Emergencies Act, and the Trade Act of 1974. These powers are often quite broad, but they come with procedural limitations. The USRTA would, by contrast, give the president more flexibility.
The ability to set duties in response to non-tariff barriers is the most important part of the bill. Such barriers—including regulations, local preferences, and the like—are an increasingly important part of global negotiations. An analysis from Stanford’s Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, for instance, found that about 22 percent of imports into China from the United States in 2019 faced non-tariff barriers. In a statement to City Journal, Moore insisted on the importance of addressing these barriers, which he said can “at times be more restrictive than tariffs alone.”
Moore’s bill would give the president considerable flexibility to raise tariffs (or threaten to raise them) in high-stakes negotiations with trading partners. The congressman argues that this proposal would give the president “additional leverage to negotiate on trade” in order to “expand access to foreign markets and drive demand for American goods overseas.”
This emphasis on expanding markets abroad shows some continuity with longstanding GOP messaging on trade. If Republicans of the past argued that multilateral trade agreements would be the best vehicle for expanding American exports, some Republicans today see the threat of tariffs as a way of opening up foreign markets while also shoring up domestic manufacturing. In line with that approach, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has consistently stressed the importance of tariffs as a negotiating tool. Bessent and others might see tariffs less as a way as withdrawing from the global market entirely than as a vehicle for repositioning the United States within that market.
The USRTA would also bolster the president’s power relative to Congress. The only way Congress could override a duty hike enacted under the bill is for both the House and Senate to pass disapproval resolutions by supermajorities—a possibly insurmountable bar. The bill has a term of three years, and it would take a congressional disapproval resolution to keep it from being renewed for three more years. Thus, the USRTA, if passed, could broaden the president’s authority to set tariff policy through the rest of Trump’s administration and into his successor’s.
Just as enhancing executive power was an essential precondition for the free-trade era of globalization, proponents of recalibrating America’s trade relationships today are also turning to the executive as a prime policy mover. It’s a high-stakes policy gamble. Wildly swinging tariff rates could cause both economic and geopolitical instability, and maximal-pressure trade negotiations might not be indefinitely sustainable. But the Trump administration and its congressional allies are betting that vigorous executive action now will pay off.
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