NEW YORK – In a controversial trade move that sidesteps congressional oversight, the Trump administration has rolled out new double-digit tariffs covering imports from more than 60 global economies, invoking a decades-old trade law that grants the executive branch broad authority to penalize nations deemed to engage in unfair, discriminatory trade practices. The new levies, announced in recent days and set to go into effect immediately, were timed to replace a temporary 10% global tariff regime that just expired. That temporary round of tariffs itself was a stopgap put in place after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an earlier broad global tariff plan in February.
Critics of the new policy argue that the tariffs, framed as a crackdown on forced labor in global supply chains, have little connection to actual enforcement gaps overseas, and are instead simply a mechanism to maintain broad import tariffs after the previous temporary regime lapsed. The tariffs, set at either 10% or 12.5%, are applied to nations the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) claims lack or fail to effectively enforce their own bans on imports produced with forced labor. With the affected countries accounting for 99% of all U.S. imports, widespread pushback from trading partners arrived almost immediately, with many leaders calling the U.S. claims unfounded and arbitrary. Critics note that nations with vastly different forced labor compliance records were assigned the same uniform tariff rate, and that after a four-month investigation, USTR has released almost no detailed information explaining how it set the final tariff levels.
The new tariffs are enacted under Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, the same legal authority former President Trump used during his first term to impose sweeping tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Chinese imports amid a dispute over Chinese technology acquisition and industrial policy. The Biden administration has continued to use Section 301 powers to address other trade grievances, including what it calls unfair competitive practices in China’s shipbuilding sector.
Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law, explained that the core appeal of Section 301 for the executive branch is that it allows the creation of permanent tariffs without requiring congressional approval. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in,” Appleton said.
While USTR says it completed a thorough review process, including consultations with all 60 investigated economies, two rounds of public hearings, and collection of more than 2,100 public comments from stakeholders, the agency has declined to share details of its bilateral engagements with affected nations, citing confidentiality rules. Trade experts point out that verifying whether a country has a forced labor import ban on the books is a straightforward process, but proving a nation is failing to enforce that ban is far more complex, and USTR has offered little concrete evidence to back up its findings.
“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington-based think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”
Even for nations that do adopt and enforce the standards Washington is demanding, there is no clear path to have the tariffs lifted, according to Patrick Childress, a partner at international law firm Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official. Childress noted that nations must prove their compliance meets U.S. standards to win relief, a high bar that means no near-term tariff reductions are likely for most affected countries. “This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.
Officials from affected nations have uniformly rejected the U.S. allegations. Brazil, which faces the higher 12.5% tariff rate, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified” in an official statement, accusing the U.S. of manipulating a critical human rights issue to penalize dozens of nations and the European Union. Australia, also assigned the 12.5% rate, pushed back as well. “We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters.
The new tariffs have also sparked backlash from some U.S. domestic industries, thanks to targeted carve-outs that exclude certain nations from the levies. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which represents U.S. textile manufacturers, is protesting an exemption that waives the new tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia, tied to those countries’ purchases of U.S. cotton and textiles. NCTO chief executive Kim Glas noted that the U.S. textile industry has been disproportionately harmed by forced labor competition, and the exemption undermines domestic producers. “No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” Glas said. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”
The debate over the new tariffs comes as existing U.S. forced labor import bans have repeatedly failed to block forced labor-produced goods from entering American markets. The U.S. currently has two core pieces of legislation addressing forced labor imports: The 1930 Tariff Act granted U.S. Customs and Border Protection authority to seize suspected shipments, but included a major loophole that allowed imports if domestic production could not meet consumer demand. That loophole was closed by the 2016 Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act. The 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act went further, blocking all imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless companies can prove their goods were produced without forced labor.
Even with these rules on the books, forced labor-produced goods still regularly enter U.S. supply chains. A 2015 Associated Press investigation uncovered widespread slave labor in the Southeast Asian fishing industry, with the caught seafood ending up in U.S. supermarkets and pet food products. A 2020 AP investigation into the global palm oil industry, worth $65 billion worldwide, found systemic labor abuse among a workforce of millions of men, women and children across Asia, with palm oil from these operations entering the supply chains of major global consumer brands including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.
Trade policy experts and business groups say a far more comprehensive approach is needed to effectively combat forced labor in global supply chains, rather than broad, blunt tariffs applied to nearly all U.S. imports. During recent congressional hearings on the new tariffs, Jonathan Gold, vice president of the National Retail Federation, who represented a cross-industry business coalition focused on forced labor policy, said effective enforcement requires clear, measurable standards for nations to meet, paired with U.S. support to help build effective enforcement capacity in developing economies. Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, echoed that view, noting that an effective ban requires transparency around investigation processes, paired with targeted aid to help nations strengthen their own enforcement regimes.