Trump’s tariff onslaught is coming faster than his team can carry out

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Trump administration is moving at warp speed to announce new tariffs. Implementing them is another story.

The president has peppered his first weeks in office with a litany of far-reaching trade actions, such as imposing tariffs on China, threatening duties on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, and announcing duties for a handful of major industrial sectors. All those announcements are creating a bottleneck at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department, which are in charge of implementing the tariffs, according to people familiar with the dynamics, prompting a mad race among staff to implement the president’s orders on a greatly accelerated time frame.

So far, only the China tariffs are in place—largely because the administration viewed them as low-hanging fruit with little collateral damage on U.S. consumers, according to people with knowledge of policy discussions. Trump has also threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico on March 4, as well as an additional 10% on China.

On Thursday, the president reiterated the levies on America’s northern and southern neighbors would move forward. After that, 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium are set for March 12. There are a number of actions set for April 2, from the completion of trade policy reviews ordered on Inauguration Day, to the unveiling of 25% tariffs on automobiles, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors.

That is also the planned date for the announcement of Trump’s levies on reciprocal trade, which will seek to equalize U.S. tariffs with the duties and nontariff barriers imposed by other nations. Administration officials are privately indicating that the full reciprocal action will take longer than