Are Trump’s drone tariffs flying blind?

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President Trump’s new Section 232 tariffs on drones and drone components are being justified as responses to national security vulnerabilities. In its proclamation, the administration points to dependence on foreign suppliers, potential cybersecurity risks, insufficient US production capacity, and inadequate incentives for domestic investment.

Some of those concerns deserve scrutiny. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has documented chokepoints in the global drone supply chain. Those vulnerabilities may well warrant concern. But identifying a problem is different from demonstrating that tariffs are the right tool to address it. Before imposing an import tax in the name of national security, policymakers should explain what specific problem it solves, how it solves it, and what would make the tariff unnecessary.

The proclamation identifies several distinct vulnerabilities, one of which is supply-chain dependence. Concentration in a foreign source can create vulnerabilities, but reducing foreign sourcing is not necessarily the same as reducing supply-chain risk.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds that diversification is generally superior to reshoring for supply-chain resilience and robustness because having multiple suppliers gives firms alternatives when one is disrupted. That suggests reducing vulnerability does not necessarily require eliminating foreign suppliers.

The cybersecurity concern presents an even more obvious question. If the problem is that a foreign drone could transmit sensitive information, how does making that drone more expensive address that security risk?

Finally, the administration argues that foreign competition has discouraged investment in US drone production. Why should more domestic production necessarily be the goal? Imports are not a failure of domestic production. They are what Americans obtain in exchange for goods and services they export. And, as CEI Vice President for Strategy and Senior Fellow Iain Murray and CEI Senior Economist Ryan Young have argued, trade can diversify supply chains by providing access to multiple sources.

More fundamentally, none of these aforementioned concerns are addressed simply by making imported drones and components more expensive. Tariffs do not by themselves diversify suppliers, secure data, or create productive capacity. They change the relative prices of foreign and domestic goods.

That distinction becomes more important when the policy is applied broadly across drones and components with considerably different security risks and supply-chain roles. China dominates the global drone industry, so the tariffs will inevitably hit Chinese supply chains particularly hard. But the proclamation does not only target China. It applies tariffs to foreign products generally, while creating preferential treatment for qualifying supply chains from certain allies.

If some foreign supply chains are compatible with national security, policymakers should explain why others require tariffs at all. The wider the tariff, the harder that mismatch is to justify.

The proclamation states that the administration wants US drone production to be faster, larger, and more competitive. Yet it also acknowledges that American producers rely on foreign components.

If those imports are necessary inputs for domestic production, taxing them is a curious way to promote that production. CEI’s Ryan Young has explained that tariffs raise costs for American businesses that use imported inputs. And as the OECD illustrates, resilience depends not simply on where production occurs, but on having alternatives when disruptions occur.  

That does not mean the United States should never produce drones or their components domestically, nor does it prescribe any particular national security strategy. It does mean policymakers should distinguish between domestic production and domestic self-sufficiency. Making foreign inputs more expensive does not by itself demonstrate that the resulting supply chain will be more resilient, secure, or efficient.

Nor does questioning the tariffs require choosing a different policy response. None of the following options act as a policy recommendation from CEI. Each would raise its own questions about effectiveness, cost, and government overreach. Conceivable approaches to address the drone supply chain include, but are not limited to:

The point of listing these options is not to endorse them, but to show that the choice is not simply between tariffs and ignoring a potential national security problem. The administration therefore needs to explain why a broad import tax is necessary to address the particular vulnerabilities it has identified.

Ultimately, the tariffs do not directly address the cybersecurity, supply-chain, or production concerns the administration identifies. In addition to the broad scope, the lack of a sunset date or an objective termination trigger compounds those problems. The result is an open-ended intervention with only a tenuous connection to solving the identified problems.

As CEI has previously argued, Congress should ultimately repeal Section 232 and reclaim its tariff-making authority so that national security does not become a blank check for the executive branch to tax American consumers and businesses.