Metals easily win tariff waivers

WASHINGTON — When Mandel Metals, an aluminum distributor outside Chicago, found its business threatened by President Trump’s tariffs on foreign metals, it filed hundreds of requests with the administration to exclude its imports from the levies.

Again and again, the administration said yes, allowing Mandel to import — if it wanted to — up to 600 million pounds of tariff-free aluminum from Greece, Italy, France, Norway and, perhaps most surprising, China.

Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum to prevent China and other countries from flooding the U.S. market with cheap metals, which he said posed a national security threat by “degrading” the industrial base. But his administration has granted nearly 3,000 requests that could exempt Chinese-made metal products from the tariffs, according to a congressional analysis.

Since March, when the tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum went into effect, the Commerce Department has approved a higher share of exclusion requests that include imports from China than it has from U.S. allies like Japan and Canada.

The approval rate stems largely from the success of two companies. Mandel has won 400 aluminum exclusions — nearly half of all the exemptions granted to companies seeking relief from the aluminum levies through early November. Those exclusions allow Mandel to import six times the amount of metal it sells every year, and company officials say they will not come close to using all of that allowance.

Greenfield Industries, a South Carolina maker of saw blades and other cutting tools, has won 1,000 exclusions from the steel tariffs. Greenfield is owned by China’s TopEastern Group.

The exclusions stem from the Commerce Department’s process for determining whether companies can win tariff relief for imported metals. The requests are generally granted as long as no American producer formally objects and says it can provide the metals.

Both supporters and opponents of the tariffs have criticized the process as haphazard and ineffective. Aluminum trade groups — including some that have criticized the tariffs — say the fact that Mandel received approval to import more metal, including aluminum from China, than it can use highlights the program’s flaws. Others have criticized the process for giving large domestic producers, like Nucor and Century Aluminum, outsize power to block exemptions by claiming they can provide the metals.

“Generally, it seems the department is not evaluating whether there is actually demand in the market for these large volumes and has granted the requests based simply on the absence of any objections,” Heidi Brock, president of the Aluminum Association, wrote in a letter to the Commerce Department this month.