In the days since President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential election, Nicole Bivens Collinson’s phone has barely stopped ringing.
Mr. Collinson, head of international trade and government relations at the lobbying firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, said he has received “dozens of complaints” from anxious U.S. companies trying to protect themselves from President Trump’s aggressive tariff plans. He said he was responding to numerous calls. Loopholes and exemptions.
“Everyone is definitely on the phone,” Collinson told CNBC. “It’s been non-stop.”
During the 2024 campaign, President Trump will make universal tariffs a core tenet of his economic platform, imposing a 20% tax on imports from all countries and a particularly steep 60% tax on Chinese products. did.
This overly protectionist approach to trade has sent chills down the spines of economists, Wall Street analysts, and industry leaders, who believe that flat tariffs could reduce production and, by extension, consumer inflation just as we are recovering from the pandemic. warned that there is a possibility of an increase in – era of rapid inflation.
“The threat of tariffs is alarming to retailers and a wide range of other U.S. businesses,” David French, senior vice president of government relations at the National Retail Federation, told CNBC. “Our members have been working on contingency plans since President Trump secured his nomination.”
Ron Solini, a principal at lobbying firm Solini Samet & Associates, agrees, saying he receives at least two to three calls a day specifically addressing business concerns about proposed tariff hikes in China. he pointed out.
”[Companies] Questions about where to go and how to extract components [of China]?How do you eliminate the entire supply chain?” Sollini said.
When President Trump imposed the first tariffs on China in 2018, securing exemptions became the golden ticket for U.S. companies, seeing them as a way to protect their China-based supply chains rather than paying the hefty price of relocation. It became.
And to get that golden ticket, it was important to know the right people.
2021 research study President Trump’s first-term tariff exemption request is likely to be approved by a lobbying firm whose employees have made political contributions to the Republican Party, a new study found.
Now, with President Trump set to take back the White House in the coming weeks, tariff hikes are becoming a reality.
And America’s corporate world is in a race to find the right lobbyists who can help companies work with the right people to give them an edge in securing tariff loopholes.
“Companies are ready,” Veliko Fotak, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and one of the authors of the 2021 study, told CNBC. “The real winners in this process will be the lawyers and lobbyists.”
It is unclear what kind of tariffs the next Trump administration will impose or whether exemptions will be available in the first place.
“Until that becomes clear, companies need to plan for different scenarios,” Tiffany Smith, vice president of global trade policy at the National Trade Council, told CNBC.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment on business concerns about the Trump administration’s waiver plans and proposed tariffs, Caroline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, further emphasized the president-elect’s campaign promises.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a wide margin and gave him a mandate to deliver on the promises he made during his campaign. He will deliver,” Levitt told CNBC.
Meanwhile, companies are trying to mount defenses against President Trump’s more aggressive trade approach. These include stockpiling goods in the short term, preparing for price increases so that the cost of import duties can be passed on to customers, and moving production out of China.
Steve Madden on Thursday pledged to cut imports from China by 45% over the next year in anticipation of President Trump’s tariff plans.
But exiting China is an important undertaking for many U.S. companies, especially small businesses that don’t have the purchasing power or influence to easily shift production.
“What I would urge is for people to look at the impact on small and medium-sized businesses. They are the ones who are really hurting. There has to be some way to help those businesses,” Solini said. he told CNBC. “Because they really can’t do anything on their own.”
