Trump will need to hire new federal workers for trade war, former Cabinet member says

The Washington Examiner CEI’s expert on how Trump’s trade policy might be at odds with the DOGE mission. 

Ryan Young, senior economist at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted that between 60% and two-thirds of imports coming into the U.S. are duty-free.
“So that, by itself, would require that many more inspections,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Some of that you have on top of the existing health and safety inspections, but that’s still a big lift.”
Young said that universal tariffs could scrap the de minimis rule, which allows shipments with an aggregate value of up to $800 to be imported without taxes or duties. He said that a large volume of packages enters the U.S. on de minimis grounds each year.
“So yeah, it would run counter to DOGE or any kind of efficiency requirement, and probably beyond the capacity of Commerce Department to simply reroute or reallocate existing employees — they would have to do a massive ramp-up in their workforce,” Young said.

More workers would likely be needed to implement the tariffs. But more workers would still be necessary to sort through exclusion petitions, which are filed by companies seeking to purchase goods from abroad without paying levies for approved reasons. The requests have to go through a specific process. If Trump follows through on all of his campaign tariff promises, there would presumably be far more exclusion petitions.
“It would be a jobs creation bonanza for the lobbying sector in D.C. for one,” Young said. “But, also, yes, you need more administrative workers in Commerce to hear all those applications and process them and make decisions up and down.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner