Efforts on relief from metals tariff faced red tape, delays, agency finds

WASHINGTON — Companies seeking relief from President Donald Trump’s taxes on imported steel and aluminum ran into long delays and cumbersome paperwork, a federal watchdog found.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the Commerce Department, overwhelmed by companies lobbying to avoid the tariffs, could not meet its own deadline for processing around three-fourths of the requests.

And the Commerce Department rejected nearly a fifth of the applications before weighing the merits of the appeal because the paperwork was incomplete or included errors.

Trump’s tariffs were controversial from the beginning. Invoking a rarely used provision of a 1962 law to label steel and aluminum imports a threat to U.S. national security, Trump imposed tariffs of 25% on foreign steel and 10% on aluminum in 2018. The idea was to strengthen U.S. producers of steel and aluminum by shielding them from foreign competition.

U.S. companies that relied on foreign steel and aluminum were allowed to appeal for relief from the tariffs, primarily by showing that they could not get the metals they needed in the United States.

In a report released late Tuesday, the accountability office said that the Commerce Department was inundated with 106,000 requests for exclusion from the tariffs — far more than expected. The department was supposed to reach a decision on each case in 60 to 149 days, depending on whether U.S. aluminum and steel producers objected to the request.

The agency found that 19,000 requests were turned down “prior to decision due to incorrect or incomplete information.” The agency said the Commerce Department did not try to learn why so many applications failed to meet its submission standards or to fix the problem.

About two-thirds of the requests for relief were ultimately approved, the accountability office found. But the department missed its own deadlines in 79% of steel cases, and 72% of aluminum cases.

The accountability office called for the department to find out why so many companies failed to fill out the paperwork correctly, to take steps to speed up the decision-making process and to study the impact the tariffs had on the metals markets and on companies that consume steel and aluminum.