By Madison Muller and Jennifer A Dlouhy
President Donald Trump’s administration pressed forward with plans to impose tariffs on semiconductor and pharmaceutical imports by initiating trade probes led by the Commerce Department.
The moves, announced Monday in the Federal Register, are a precursor to imposing tariffs and threaten to broaden the president’s sweeping US trade war.
The Commerce Department said it had begun investigating the impact on US national security of “imports of semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment” as well as “pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical ingredients, including finished drug products” in a pair of register notices.
The probes, which began April 1 and were ordered under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, could play out for months. Under the law, the Commerce Secretary is expected to deliver the results of his investigation within 270 days, though Trump and other officials have signaled these efforts could conclude more quickly.
The US president has long decried foreign production of drugs and chips as a threat to national security and threatened to slap tariffs on imports in a bid to revive American manufacturing of those products. But the duties could also wreak havoc on supply chains and drive up costs for Americans.
New levies threaten to roil a chips industry that notched more than $600 billion in global sales of semiconductors essential to products ranging from cars to airplanes and mobile phones to consumer electronics. Supply chains still feeling the effect of disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic now could face new strains from the US duties.
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