The Trump administration official eliminated a escape on Friday that had allowed American buyers to buy cheap products from China without paying tariffs. The measure will help manufacturers who have fought to compete with a wave of low -cost Chinese products, but has already resulted in higher prices for Americans who buy online.
The escape, called minimis rule, allowed products of up to $ 800 to avoid rates and other bureaucrats whenever they were sent directly to US consumers or small businesses. It resulted in a wave of individual packages aimed at the United States, many air -sent and ordered rapidly growing electronic commerce platforms such as Shein and Temu.
A growing number of companies used escape in recent years to take their products to the United States without facing tariffs. After President Trump imposed Duke’s duties to the duration of Chinese products in his first term, companies began using the exemption to avoid these rates and continue selling their products more economically to the United States. The use of the escape increased in Mr. Trump’s second mandate when he hit Chinese products with a minimum of 145 percent tariffs.
Customs and border protection of the United States processed one billion these packages in 2023, whose average value was $ 54.
In a cabinet meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Trump referred to the escape as “a scam.”
“It is a great scam against our country, against small businesses,” he said. “And we have finished, we put it in.”
Trump’s decision was partly related to the groups about the use of escape as a conduit for fentanil in the United States.
The exemption allowed companies that send economic goods to send less information to customs officers than other standard shipments. The administration said that drug traffickers were “exploiting” the escape by sending precursor chemicals and other materials used to make fentanyl in the United States without having to provide shipping details.
The growing use of escape also threatened the work of the United States in storage and logistics. He encouraged the main American retailers to send more products directly from China to the doors of consumers, avoiding larger shipments that were subject to rates and then distributed through warehouses and US delivery networks. UU.
Kim Glas, the president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, which represses American textile manufacturers and fought to eliminate escape, said he had “devastated the textile industry of the United States.” Mrs. Glas said she had allowed insecure and illegal products to flood US market taxes for years. More than half or all minimis shipments by value contained textile and clothing products, he said.
“This tariff lagoon has granted China almost unilateral and privileged access to the US market at the expense of US manufacturers and the work of the United States,” he said.
But the opponents of ending the exemption complained that the measure would significantly increase prices for US consumers, would harm small businesses that had built their businesses around escape and slow down the flow of trade between countries. The change is expected despite airlines and private carriers such as Fedex and UPS, which has a constant business that flies small goods throughout the world to the United States.
The changes, which apply to shipments from Continental and Hong Kong, get used to 12:01 am on Friday. It is likely that they will sow pain and confusion for consumers, as well as small retailers.
Themu recently began to enumerate the “import positions” in its place, while Shein’s website tells buyers that tariffs are “included in the price he pays.”
Gabriel Wildou, Chinese analyst in Teneo, an advice firm, said the change “eliminates Chinese exports” and “forn the online retailers whose main point of sale is very cheap prices to raise their dramatic prices.”
“It is a price shock for American consumers sensitive to prices that really enjoyed access to cheap products,” he said.
The Trump administration has also promised to eliminate escape for shipments from other countries, but said it was waiting until the government discovered how to deal with the collection rates of such packages. The United States Customs officials are already carrying Trump administrations, a greater application of immigration rules and a wide expansion of global tariffs.
The letter of the administration extinguished the exception of Minimis for China in early February, before realizing that the sudden change was overvalued shipping channels, including postal service. Mr. Trump then reversed that order to give the advisors more time to establish systems that could accommodate the change.
The exception of Minimis was created in the 1930s to relieve the work of customs officials to whom they had to collect tariffs in cases where income would be lower than the cost of collecting tasks. The Congress raised the threshold for minimis packages to $ 5 in 1978 and $ 200 in 1993, and then at $ 800 in 2016.
In recent years, the pressure to eliminate the lagoon has grown. Legislators have bone legislation to reform the minimis rule, and the Biden administration proposed changes last year that would reduce the exception when it was China.
A possible problem with the current rules is that they seem to create a discrepancy that allows goods to be transferred through the post office to be subject to lower tariffs than the goods moved using private operators.
The assets that enter the United States from China through private operators such as DHL or Fedex will be subject to rates of at least 145 percent of the example, adding $ 14.50 or duties to a $ 10 shirt. But shipments that enter through the postal service face a rate or 120 percent of the value of the goods or a rate of $ 100 per package, which is $ 200 in June.
Shipments that arrive through private operators also seem to be subject to other duties, such as the rates that Mr. Trump imposed on China in his first mandate, and the most favored nation duties established by the World Trade Organization. But the shipments that travel through the postal service are not.
In addition, the postal service seems to face less scrutiny to collect tariffs on goods sent from China to other countries and then to the United States through foreign postal services.
The United States, for now, still sacrifices the exception of minimis for countries other than China. But as of Friday, the goods made in China are not supposed to qualify for minimis, even if they are enrutrous through another country before coming to the United States. Private operators such as UPS and Fedex are required to collect information about the origin of the products, so that tariffs must still be paid for a Chinese good that is sent to the United States through Canada, for example.
But the postal service does not have legal legal required to collect information about where the products originate, and Neith are foreign postal services. That could lead to an increase in schemes trying to avoid China’s rates using the post office.
Peter Eavis and Julie Creswell Contributed reports.
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