Top trade advisers to former President Donald Trump slammed an effort by Republican and Democratic lawmakers to immediately expand tariff exclusions on billions of dollars of Chinese goods, exposing a fault line inside Congress over trade policies involving China.
In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including 60 Republicans, urged President Joe Biden’s top trade official to expand tariff exclusions on Chinese goods, arguing that the administration’s current proposal to relaunch exclusions is too narrow. The tariffs are undermining the competitiveness of American manufacturing compared to foreign competitors and hurting U.S. consumers, the letter says.
The Trump-era tariffs were aimed at pressuring the country to halt what officials described as a pattern of unfair trade practices and theft of American intellectual property. But companies said the barriers came at a cost to American firms, with many growing frustrated that Biden has not done more to ease them.
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