After President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs earlier this month, the White House released a list of more than a thousand products that would be exempted.
One item that made
the list is polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET resin, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles.
Why it was spared is unclear, and even people in the industry are confused about the reason for the reprieve.
But its inclusion is a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes. Records show the company recently hired a lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump White House to make its case on tariffs.
Whether the company’s lobbying played any role in the exemption is unclear. Reyes Holdings and its lobbyists did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not comment, but some industry advocates say the administration has
rebuffed requests for exemptions.
The resin’s unexplained inclusion on the list exemplifies how opaque the administration’s process for crafting its tariff policy has been. Major stakeholders are in the dark about why certain products face levies and others don’t.
Tariff rates have been altered without any clear explanation for the changes. Administration officials have given
conflicting messages about the tariffs or declined to answer questions at all.
The lack of transparency about the process has created concerns among trade experts that politically connected firms might be winning carve-outs behind closed doors.
“It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” a lobbyist who works on tariff policy said of PET resin’s inclusion. “To be honest, this was such a hurried mess, I am not sure who got into the White House to talk to folks about the list.”
During the first Trump administration, there was a formal process for seeking an exemption from tariffs. Companies submitted hundreds of thousands of applications making the case for why their products should be spared. The applications were public, so the machinery of the tariff crafting process could be more closely examined. Such transparency allowed academics to subsequently analyze thousands of the applications and determine that political donors to Republicans
were more likely to be granted exemptions.
In Trump’s second term, at least thus far, there has not been a formal application process for tariff carve-outs. Industry
executives and lobbyists are making their case
behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week called “the opacity of the process” for getting an exemption “the Beltway Swamp’s dream.”
In the
executive order formalizing Trump’s new tariffs, including baseline 10% tariffs for almost all countries, exemptions were broadly defined as products in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, lumber, copper, critical minerals and energy sectors. An accompanying list detailed the specific products that would be spared.
But a ProPublica review of that list found many items that don’t fit neatly, or at all, in those broad categories, and some items that fall squarely within the categories were not spared.
The White House exclusions list, for example, included most types of asbestos, which is not generally considered a critical mineral and doesn’t seem to fit in any of the exempted categories. The cancer-causing mineral, which is not generally considered critical to national security or the U.S. economy, is still used to make chlorine, but the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency banned imports of the material last year. The Trump administration has signaled it may roll back some of those Biden-era restrictions…
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