U.S. importers tear into steel-makers
Objections to tariff waivers stir fuss
WASHINGTON — U.S. companies seeking to be exempted from President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported steel are accusing American steel manufacturers of spreading inaccurate and misleading information.
Robert Miller, president and CEO of NLMK USA, said objections raised by U.S. Steel and Nucor to his bid for a waiver are “literal untruths.” He said his company, which imports slabs of steel from Russia, has already paid $80 million in duties and will be forced out of business if it isn’t excused from the 25 percent tariff. U.S. Steel and Nucor are two of the country’s largest steel producers.
“They ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Miller, who employs more than 1,100 people at mills in Pennsylvania and Indiana.
Miller’s comments, echoed by several other executives, is evidence of the backlash over how the Commerce Department is evaluating their requests to avoid the duty on steel imports. They fear that the agency will be swayed by opposition from U.S. Steel, Nucor and other domestic steel suppliers that support tariffs and say they’ve been unfairly hurt by a glut of imports.
U.S. Steel said its objections are based on detailed information about the dimensions and chemistry of the steel included in the requests. “We read what is publicly posted and respond,” said spokesman Meghan Cox.
Nucor did not reply to requests for comment.
Nucor, the nation’s largest steel producer, has four facilities near Blytheville, employing some 1,700 people. Nucor also is building a $230 million cold mill that will create about 100 jobs.
The more than 20,000 waiver applications that the Commerce Department has received illustrate the uncertainty ignited by U.S. trade disputes against America’s allies and adversaries. It’s a battle that critics of Trump’s trade policy, including a number of Republican lawmakers, have warned is misguided and will end up harming U.S. businesses.
Trump and European leaders agreed Wednesday not to escalate their trade disputee, but the tariff on steel and a separate duty on aluminum imports remains in place as the U.S. and Europe aim for a broader trade agreement. The duties would continue to hit U.S. trading partners such as Canada, Mexico and Japan even if the U.S. and the EU forge a deal.
Miller bristled over the insistence by Nucor and U.S. Steel that steel slab is readily available in the United States. “That’s just not true,” he said.
His company isn’t the only one looking overseas for a product described as being consistently in short supply. California Steel Industries, a mill east of Los Angeles in Fontana, described the slab shortage as “acute” on the West Coast and declared that its waiver request is critical to its survival.
Aiming to rebuild the U.S. steel industry, Trump relied on a rarely used 1962 law that empowers him to impose tariffs on particular imports if the Commerce Department determines those goods threaten national security. Companies can be excused from the tariff if they can show, for example, that U.S. manufacturers don’t make the metal they need in sufficient quantities.
The requests are open to objections. The Commerce Department posts the exemption requests online to allow third parties to offer comments — even from competitors that have an interest in seeing a rival’s request denied. But objections are frequently being submitted just as the comment period closes, undercutting the requester’s ability to respond.
Willie Chiang, executive vice president of Plains All American Pipeline, told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade last week that his company had no opportunity to respond to objections that contained “incorrect information” before the Commerce Department denied its exclusion request.
“The intent here is to restrict imports on a broad scale,” said Richard Chriss, executive director of the American Institute for International Steel, a free-trade group opposed to tariffs. “It wouldn’t make sense from the administration’s perspective to design a process that readily granted exclusions.”
The Commerce Department declined to comment.
Department officials have so far made public only a small number of their rulings.
An analysis of the numbers by the office of Rep. Jackie Walorski, an Indiana Republican and one of Congress’ most vocal opponents of the steel tariff, shows that 760 requests have been approved while 552 have been denied. The department hasn’t yet approved any waiver requests that triggered objections, according to Walorski’s review.
Her office also examined the more than 5,600 publicly available comments and found they were submitted on average about four days before the end of the 30-day comment period. More than 50 percent of the comments weren’t delivered until 48 hours or less before the comment window closed. It took the Commerce Department an average of nine days to post comments online after receiving them, according to the analysis.
The most prolific commenters were Nucor and U.S. Steel with 1,064 and 1,009, respectively.