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President Donald Trump by Al Drago/Bloomberg

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The Trump administration is pressing ahead with another tariff barrage that some trade experts say is more legally sound than the president’s country-by-country duties and may end up having an equally broad effect on imports.

The Commerce Department is set within weeks to announce the outcomes of its investigations into sectors deemed vital to national security, including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals. The probes are widely expected to result in levies on a range of foreign-made products in those industries.

President Donald Trump is already using that authority, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, to impose import taxes on steel and aluminum he launched in 2018. Recently, he has widened the scope by targeting consumer goods that contain the metals.

By one estimate from Michigan State University, Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, currently set at 50%, are hitting almost $200 billion worth of steel, aluminum and household items such as fishing reels and brooms — nearly quadruple the amount during his first term.

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The effort comes as Trump’s April tariffs on major trading partners stand on shakier legal ground, with the Supreme Court asked on June 17 to consider striking them down. Some administration officials believe the 232 levies could effectively supplant the country-by-country duties that have drawn legal scrutiny and bogged down negotiations with U.S. allies and adversaries alike trying to strike deals.

Nazak Nikakhtar, a partner at Wiley Rein and former senior Commerce official during Trump’s first term, said the 232 measures are shaping up to amount to “something close to global tariffs.”

“These 232 actions are very likely going to result in import restrictions on almost every good entering the U.S., and the size and scale of these restrictions will be so massive because China’s distortion has been so massive,” she added.

Speaking to reporters this week while returning from the Group of Seven summit in Canada, Trump said pharmaceutical tariffs will be coming “very soon” and they will encourage companies to reshore production. “It’s going to bring most of them back into, at least partially back in,” he said.

The Commerce Department did not respond to a request for comment.

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The latest example of Trump’s wider targeting under his 232 powers came last week when the Commerce Department announced that 50% duties on steel and aluminum products would be expanded to cover home appliances including dishwashers, dryers and washing machines. All of those items are deemed vital to national security under the law Trump invoked to impose duties.

A similar approach is anticipated for the remaining seven open probes. On chips, for example, the president already promised to hit smartphones made by Apple Inc. and other competitors if they’re not made in the U.S.

U.S. companies can petition the administration to add the goods they produce domestically to the 232 tariffs. Included on Trump’s list of steel and aluminum tariffs this year are gymnasium equipment, clothes hangers and door thresholds.

When the Court of International Trade last month ruled that Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs — announced on April 2 — imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were illegal and had to be removed, companies and trading partners breathed a sigh of relief.

But that consolation might only be temporary, even if Trump’s IEEPA path is ultimately blocked by the courts.

The president’s 232 authority is designed to protect specific industries “but they can get pretty broad” under the current inclusions process, Marcus Eeman, a senior customs manager with digital freight company Flexport Inc., said during a webinar earlier this month.

“This may be kind of a slow-burn way that the president can keep ratcheting up tariffs,” he said. “Not quite the country-wide level he has been using” with his April 2 tariffs “but more the product-wide level instead.”

Yet Trump’s ongoing 232 investigations have had an indirect effect on his wider trade strategy: They have injected uncertainty into negotiations between the U.S. and other countries, aimed at forging deals to lower the higher tariffs Trump announced in April and then largely paused for 90 days.

Countries have expressed wariness about signing deals — even framework agreements — while those probes are still pending, because that could mean jettisoning any leverage to secure changes to the resulting sectoral tariffs later, said a person familiar with the matter.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said June 17 at a press conference as the G7 summit wrapped up that “it is important to proceed slowly but surely.” He added, “We must not prioritize reaching an early agreement at the expense of our national interests.”

Countries can’t know for sure how 232 levies might interact with Trump’s nation-by-nation rates, said Leland Miller, co-founder of the China Beige Book and a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission established by Congress to monitor bilateral relations. He described “a built-in uncertainty” tied to those Commerce investigations.

A key question for negotiating countries is whether those individual product levies would stack on top of country-based rates. “That’s very different than saying we’re taking whatever is the highest of the two rates,” Miller said. “And they don’t have to even announce that. Trump could change his mind down the line.”

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Among the economists closely tracking the fallout of Trump’s 232 tariffs is Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State, one of the nation’s top-ranked schools for supply chain management.

Back in 2018, the main targets were upstream metals like raw aluminum and steel coils. “This time we’ve got a lot of finished consumer goods” such as metal furniture, kitchen knives, and cooking pots and pans,” said Miller, the professor. “The scope of the 232s this time is just so much broader.”

He worries that such an approach might be more inflationary this time around. One example he’s monitoring is the government’s Producer Price Index gauge of manufactured steel cans and tinware products, which has jumped 8.7% this year — and that was before the tariffs doubled earlier this month.

Tin plate — steel sheets coated with protective tin — wasn’t targeted in Trump’s first-term probes, but this time it is. Because American makers of metal cans are reliant on imports for the raw material, Miller of Michigan State sees three possible outcomes: less variety because importers will balk at foreign supplies, inflation or demand destruction.

“It’s way too early to make a call that there’s no inflation yet,” he said. “It’s going to take quite a while for some of these things to work their way through.”

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