Hours into a hearing with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, members of the House Ways and Means Committee got the news: The thing they’d been talking about all morning — President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff program — was now mostly on pause.
Democrats were irate.
“You just found out three seconds ago, sitting here, we saw you. We’ve been discussing — you came here knowing that you were going to be turned off, that these tariffs were going to be turned off. Why didn’t you include that in your opening statement? Why didn’t you reference that as part of your testimony?” Rep. Steven Horsford asked Greer after the announcement from Trump on Truth Social.
“Typically, what I don’t do is divulge the contents of my discussions” with the president, Greer said.
“What does this even mean for your negotiating strategy? How are you in charge of negotiation if the president is tweeting about this from wherever the hell he is?” Horsford asked. “W.T.F. Who’s in charge? Because it sure doesn’t look like it’s the trade representative. You just got the rug pulled out from under you.”
Greer had spent most of the morning to that point defending Trump’s tariff program, which had deeply unsettled markets and economists. House Republicans on the committee largely backed him up, saying they were willing to accept some economic pain to get to Trump’s ideal economy.
But Trump’s announced pause on most of the tariff program threw the hearing upside-down.
“I feel like you’re in a very bad position here, this whole idea that this president made this switcheroo on you while you were in the middle of testifying here today. I feel, I actually feel bad for you, but I really feel bad for the American people that are seeing these things. There’s no plan,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi.
And Rep. Jimmy Gomez referenced a post on X by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick “where he states Scott Bessent and him sat with [the] President when they drafted the post, the Truth Social post that paused the tariffs for 90 days. This is just to emphasize that we don’t really know who’s running things over there.”
Republicans, for the most part, appeared to run with their plan at the start of the day even after Trump announced the pause.
GOP Rep. Rudy Yakym, who spoke after Horsford, pivoted to asking if Greer was “consulting with industries and companies being targeted by retaliatory tariffs” — the state of which is now more unclear — and about reports that suggest “Canada and Mexico are open to coordinating with the United States on China’s overcapacity.”
Rep. Max Miller asked how “the administration is working with industry stakeholders and international trading partners to maintain secure, reliable access” to imported products that are hard to produce domestically, like coffee.
Toward the end of his questioning, Miller made a comment about the market going back up before yielding his time back.
And Republican Rep. Aaron Bean fawned over both Greer and Trump, saying, “You and this president, President Trump, have chosen to not ignore a problem anymore.”
Briefly, he mentioned, “Right now we’ve got over 70 countries that said, ‘America, we want to work with you. We’re going to eliminate tariffs.’ So it is working. And my phone just went off that the president just recently said we’re going to call timeout on a 90-day pause on every nation except China. That’s breaking news, Mr. Ambassador.”
This came after a long hearing where Republicans gave Greer a reprieve from tough questions, and Democrats made their displeasure with the tariffs very clear.
“Our large and persistent trade deficit has been over 30 years in the making, and it will not be resolved overnight,” Greer testified early in the hearing. “This adjustment may be challenging at times. This is a moment of drastic and overdue change, but I’m confident that the American people will rise to the occasion as they’ve done before.”
In their questions to Greer, Republicans on the committee generally agreed with that premise. And they repeatedly suggested that some pain was difficult but likely necessary.
Trump “stands up into a stiff wind and says it’s going to hurt for a while until we get back to where we need to be,” Rep. Mike Kelly said during the hearing.
“The Trump agenda prioritizes the long-term prosperity of working families and communities ahead of short-term stock market swings,” said Republican committee chair Rep. Jason Smith. “The American people are counting on us to think beyond today’s headlines and stay focused on growing the economy and creating good-paying jobs.”
Republican House members alluded to current economic pain more broadly as temporary or worthwhile for the outcome of increased market share down the road — an ends-justify-the-means argument, which at least for now appears to be on hold.
“We have allowed this unfair trade dynamic to persist for so long. There’s no way out of this without some front-end pain, and I’m grateful that we have a leader who’s not trying to diminish that or hide that fact, but is transparently calling this nation to persist through this front end,” Rep. Jodey Arrington said.
GOP members mostly lobbed softballs toward Greer. Rep. Greg Steube asked Greer to “start by reminding this committee why President Trump felt it necessary to take such divisive action with tariffs, and what problems he inherited from decades of failed globalist trade policy.”
Some members on the committee did ask Greer how negotiations over new trade deals were going. Greer said countries like Israel, Vietnam and Argentina have indicated they will reduce tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and he said he had meetings with the European Union, Korea, Ecuador and Mexico on Tuesday after testifying in the Senate.
GOP Rep. Adrian Smith asked about Greer’s relationship with the U.K. and Kenya. Greer said he’s had “a number of conversations” with his British counterpart that were “on a good footing,” and “a very fruitful conversation” with a Kenyan representative who “wants to work with us.”
Across the aisle, Democrats were not happy, which they made clear repeatedly.
“We don’t object to all tariffs, targeting tariffs, the threat of tariffs; it frequently can bring about an outcome that is negotiated and desirable — but to raise prices on the American family and to kill our own exports is unacceptable,” said ranking member Rep. Richard Neal.
On negotiating new deals, Rep. Suzan DelBene asked, “How can any country trust the U.S. enough to make a trade deal, given that Trump has thrown out existing trade deals like Australia or South Korea or even USMCA, which he negotiated and Congress enacted?”
“The United States remains the consumer market of choice for everybody,” Greer said.
It remains to be seen how true that is, as Trump’s tariff pause shakes out with other countries, and if the negotiations he said contributed to the pause result in the better markets he promised.
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.