Escaping Trump’s tariffs has required navigating a ‘broken’ system vulnerable to corruption, businesses and academics say

New York CNN — In 2018, Bobby Djavaheri feared his family’s appliance business faced an existential threat from the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese air fryers. The GAO review found “inconsistencies” in how USTR reviewed applications and that the agency “did not fully document all of its internal procedures.” Relatedly, the Commerce Department’s inspector general in 2019 found shortfalls with a separate exclusion process run by that agency for Section 232 tariffs on other countries besides China. The review found “a lack of transparency that contributes to the appearance of improper influence in decision-making for tariff exclusion requests.” A subsequent inspector general report released in 2021 concluded that US companies were “denied exclusions based on incomplete and contradictory information.” The murky and unpredictable nature of the process during the last Trump administration is making some fear exclusions will be used as a way to curry favor with special interests. The researchers found that the system allowed the “administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies.” ‘Indicative of quid pro quo arrangements’ The odds of winning an exemption went down for firms whose executives backed the opposing party, the study found: The probability of approval fell by 3.4 percentage points for firms that backed Democratic candidates. However, SUNY Buffalo finance professor Veljko Fotak, one of the authors of the study on tariffs, said the “depressing” reality is the process that was constructed under Trump’s first administration hasn’t been significantly overhauled under Biden.