President-elect Donald Trump‘s planned massive new tariff regime would likely require more government employees, his former Commerce Department secretary said, even as the Trump administration aims to slash the federal bureaucracy.
While there is already a tariff infrastructure in place within the Commerce Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and Customs and Border Protection that implemented President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs during his first term in office — and President Joe Biden’s continuation of them. Trump’s campaign has vowed to dramatically increase tariffs from their current baseline.
During an interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump’s former secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, said that he doesn’t think it will take a long time to implement new tariffs but said that there might need to be some added staffing resources.
“If there are very wide-scale tariffs, there undoubtedly would be a need to hire more customs people,” Ross said. “Because if you’re having dozens and dozens of more products, and those products have hundreds of thousands of elements to them and 40 or 50 or 100 jurisdictions from which they’re coming, you’re gonna need more customs people.”
While Trump’s tariffs during his first term were targeted and largely focused on steel and aluminum, he campaigned to implement 10% to 20% across-the-board tariffs.
Additionally, Trump has already announced some new tariffs. On social media, Trump said that he would put tariffs against Mexico and Canada right after he entered office. He said that the 25% tariffs are designed to coerce the two countries into stopping the flow of narcotics and illegal immigrants into the U.S.
Additionally, Trump wants Congress to pass the Reciprocal Trade Act, a change that would give him the power to unilaterally impose tariffs of equal size placed by other countries on the U.S. The idea is that U.S. tariffs should be aligned with those of its trading partners.
Not only would such a plan face legislative hurdles, but it would also be difficult to administer. CBP would have to spend an enormous amount of time and paperwork determining where an import came from. Bill Reinsch, a trade policy expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served for 15 years as president of the National Foreign Trade Council, said it would be a “nightmare” for CBP to administer reciprocal tariffs.
The possibly massive ramp-up in tariffs comes as Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy plan for a Department of Government Efficiency, which would try to reduce the size of government bureaucracy by finding efficiencies and cutting out waste.
Ryan Young, senior economist at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted that between 60% and two-thirds of imports coming into the U.S. are duty-free.
“So that, by itself, would require that many more inspections,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Some of that you have on top of the existing health and safety inspections, but that’s still a big lift.”
Young said that universal tariffs could scrap the de minimis rule, which allows shipments with an aggregate value of up to $800 to be imported without taxes or duties. He said that a large volume of packages enters the U.S. on de minimis grounds each year.
“So yeah, it would run counter to DOGE or any kind of efficiency requirement, and probably beyond the capacity of Commerce Department to simply reroute or reallocate existing employees — they would have to do a massive ramp-up in their workforce,” Young said.
More workers would likely be needed to implement the tariffs. But more workers would still be necessary to sort through exclusion petitions, which are filed by companies seeking to purchase goods from abroad without paying levies for approved reasons. The requests have to go through a specific process. If Trump follows through on all of his campaign tariff promises, there would presumably be far more exclusion petitions.
“It would be a jobs creation bonanza for the lobbying sector in D.C. for one,” Young said. “But, also, yes, you need more administrative workers in Commerce to hear all those applications and process them and make decisions up and down.”
Still, Ross said that the exclusion process was fairly streamlined under his tenure. He said Commerce could simply grant exclusions while, in some cases, exclusion decisions came down to Trump himself.
“So he is well familiar with the idea that you generally have to make some exceptions, and you can do them pretty quickly because it’s much simpler to grant an exclusion than it is to put a tariff in to begin with,” Ross said.
Veteran Republican consultant Jason Roe brushed aside concerns about huge ramp-ups in staffing. He pointed out that technology has evolved a lot, and there might be means and methods to sidestep further entrenching the bureaucracy through the use of automation.
“So you know, when you think about that, and then you think about the people that are put in charge of DOGE, particularly Musk, it is conceivable that there’s a way to do this that doesn’t add to the regulatory burdens, but maybe even streamlines them,” Roe told the Washington Examiner.
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Ross, who recently released his memoir Risks and Returns, Creating Success in Business and Life, said that the tariffs implemented under Trump’s first term were largely successful, and, looking forward, he expects the president-elect to be even more forceful with them this time around.
“It didn’t destroy the consuming industries. And it didn’t lead to widespread inflation. So I think, if anything, he will be more aggressive with tariffs than before,” Ross said.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
