Source: Blog – Alliance for American Manufacturing

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer holds a copy of the 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers as he testifies before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. | Getty Images

Jamieson Greer tells Senators they’ll come down if countries remove their own barriers to U.S. exports.

Recently raised tariffs aren’t coming down anytime soon, the Trump administration’s top trade official told members of Congress on Tuesday. And don’t hold your breath on product exclusions, either.

“We must move away from an economy based solely on the financial sector and government spending, and we must become an economy based on producing real goods and services.,” said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee, which held a hearing on President Trump’s trade agenda — and grilled him on the reciprocal tariffs enacted by the administration last week. “This adjustment may be challenging at times. It is a moment of drastic, overdue change, but I am confident the American people will rise to the occasion as they have done before.”

This was not the message most of the senators wanted to hear when Greer sat for a few hours to explain (and mostly defend) the 10% baseline tariffs raised by the Trump administration on all imports and the higher “reciprocal” duties placed on imports from countries it says maintain steeper barriers to U.S. exports. But, Greer argued, maintaining them was crucial to bringing trade deficits down, which are emblematic of the lost industrial capacity that is in turn a national security problem. That’s a position the Alliance for American Manufacturing supports.

That’s not to say the tariffs can’t come down, the USTR said, in response to a question from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). But that will only happen if reciprocity is introduced into our trading relationships; if barriers to U.S. goods are lowered and our deficits shrink:

“It’s important to understand the sense of the emergency we’re facing, and the urgency, the need to reshore and do manufacturing here. It’s incredibly important to the president. Yesterday he said he’s happy to engage in negotiations immediately with countries that believe they can help us reduce our deficit and get rid of the nontariff barriers and tariffs that affect that. I think the answer is it’s gonna be country by country. There wil be Some countries that will not be able to address their nontariff barriers or their tariffs or their deficits fully, andthere will be others who will be able to do that, where the president will have the option of making a deal with them. problems and others will.”

Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) asked Greer to clarify what the point of these tariffs are.

“I want to get an understand from you of what you see are the goals of this trade war, because at various times it’s goals have been described as to raise revenue, to stop fentanyl trafficking, and to close trade deficits,” she said. “Is the goal to raise revenue for the fed treasury?”

“Senator, this is not a trade war,” Greer responded. “Most countries have said they are not going to retaliate. We have an underlying emergency. The goal is to address the (trade deficit) and the offshoring that led to that and the non-reciprocal treatment that led to that. That’s the goal.”

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) asked him about the strategy behind this. “You’re in the midst of trade negotiations with 90 different countries at the same time, by your own testimony, all of whom can make their own assessments about where the pressure points are on you and on us. Because we’re spread all over the globe.”

A more strategic approach, Bennet said, “would have had the benefit about giving us more certainty about where we are headed.” Why this approach?

“If you look at the results of the reciprocal tariff, the western hemisphere generally is at the lowest tariff rate,” responded Greer. “If you look at where we have the largest problem with nonreciprocity and (goods trade) deficit countries its mostly in Asia. So you do actually see a strategic outcome with respect to promoting production in the western hemisphere, as opposed to all this overproduction in asia that’s given rise to all our current problems in trade.

Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), meanwhile, asked him about how the administration would measure the new policy’s progress.

“In other areas of federal policies we have clear metrics to measure success,” Young said. “We do it in social policy, in education policy, in defense policy. But in trade policy, especially tariffs, we lack a clear set of metrics and a feedback loop. Does USTR have a formal process to evaluate whether these tariffs are achieving their goals?”

“The underlying basis for this action is the national emergency rising from the trade deficit,” said Greer. “When we’re looking at whether that emergency is abating, we’re looking at outcomes. Certainly, if other countries are bringing down tariffs and non-tariff barriers, that’s a good indicator. We also want to make sure the trade deficit is going in the right direction. And that means two things: It means we have better access, that we can export more to these markets, but it also means they’re not using us as a dumping ground for their overproduction or their subsidized products.” It’s a country-by-country analysis, Greer said, and it goes case by case.

Watch the whole thing here:

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