The White House Is Reducing Some Tariffs on Food and Agriculture, U.S. Trade Rep Says

The Trump administration is preparing to remove more of its sweeping tariffs from a range of imports, the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, confirmed to reporters Friday.

“This is primarily food and agriculture products that we simply don’t make in the United States,” he said. “With the deals from the summer with the EU and the U.K., the president’s successful swing through Asia … we’ve really reached that critical mass where we started to reshape the global trade system in a way we think is better for America, and so now is the right time to … release some of these items.”

Greer’s comments came after a New York Times report that attributed the planned exemptions to the White House’s effort to bring down prices for consumers. The administration has long argued its tariffs are not a tax on the public, but the planned reductions appear all but a tacit admission that eliminating the duties would bring relief to Americans worried about higher prices.

The Supreme Court is still weighing the legality of many of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, but the president and other officials have said the administration is committed to utilizing them.

The president has promised to redistribute some of the proceeds directly to Americans in the form of $2,000 checks — a move that needs the approval of a skeptical Congress.

Democrats won multiple races in this month’s elections after discussing the affordability of goods.

Greer suggested that walking back some tariffs was long in the works and signaled in September, pointing to the president’s actions at the time to modify some tariff rates.

“We look at Southeast Asia and South America, that’s where we get a lot of this stuff — the coffee, the cocoa, the bananas, those kinds of things — so this is a natural outgrowth, exactly what the president signaled,” Greer said.