Update: On March 30, 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor proposed a regulation to expand the ability for retirement plans to invest in alternative assets. Among other components, the rule would expand “safe harbor” provisions that reduce the liability for fiduciaries, who have the legal responsibility to act in their client’s best interest when managing their money, when investing in certain types of riskier alternative assets. 

The rationale for taxpayers subsidizing retirement accounts is to help workers build secure retirements, not to promote risky investment strategies that are at best suitable for wealthy investors. The Department of Labor’s new proposed rule on alternative investments ignores the plain meaning of plan fiduciaries’ duty of prudence under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, reframing the purpose of these accounts as maximizing risk-adjusted returns no matter how high the risk, rather than offering balanced investment portfolios suitable for retirement savers.

In addition to steering new customers to private equity, private credit, and cryptocurrency funds to the benefit of Wall Street and crypto insiders, the DOL’s proposed rule potentially helps wealthy investors who can shift risky investments to tax-favored accounts while endangering ordinary workers who do not have the necessary information to assess the risks and costs of these opaque and speculative investments.

For more on President Trump’s executive order instructing DOL to issue such a rule, see EPI’s FAQ on the subject.

Timeline:

On August 7, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing agencies to “reexamine” regulations and guidance for retirement plan administrators to encourage the inclusion of alternative assets, or “alts,” among the investment options available to participants in 401(k) and similar retirement plans. Alts can include funds invested in private equity and cryptocurrencies. 

The EO:  

• Listed direct and indirect interests in private market investments, real estate, digital assets, commodities, infrastructure, and longevity risk-sharing pools.  

• Directed the Department of Labor (DOL) to consider rescinding a Biden-era guidance expressing concern about risks associated with private equity. DOL dutifully rescinded the guidance on August 12, less than a week after Trump’s order, supported by a report from the president’s Council of Economic Advisors touting the supposed benefits of alts for retirement savers.   

• Directed DOL to look for ways to curb litigation under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), including possibly expanding “safe harbor” protocols that, if followed, would relieve fiduciaries’ legal liability for losses arising from plan sponsors’ and advisors’ choice of investment options.   

• Directed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to help facilitate access to alts, including possibly relaxing rules that currently limit some investments to accredited investors or qualified purchasers. 

The DOL and SEC are expected to issue proposed rules for comment on these instructions by early February 2026. 

“Private market” investments include private equity funds, private credit, and other investments that are subject to far fewer regulations than publicly-traded stocks and bonds. Private market investments are normally restricted to sophisticated investors, who are assumed to have enough financial knowledge, experience, and wealth to understand and take on significant risk.  

“Digital assets” include cryptocurrencies – artificially scarce “objects” that can be used as stores of value and means of exchange. Cryptocurrencies operate similarly to currencies issued by governments in some ways, but they are decentralized and privately issued. 

Though offering these and other types of alt investments in participant-directed retirement plans is not explicitly banned under current law, employers and advisors who serve as retirement plan fiduciaries can be sued for including inappropriately risky and costly assets among investment options. Outside of retirement plans, marketing private equity and other largely unregulated alternative assets to small investors is mostly prohibited by securities laws, regulations, and agency guidance—though cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are sold to anyone.  

“Alts” like private equity have so far made little headway in the 401(k) space, though some major players began marketing managed funds with alternative asset components to 401(k) plan sponsors even before Trump issued his executive order.   

Impact:  

This EO targets regulations and guidance that protect retirement savers and also help financial markets steer capital to productive uses for the long-term health of the economy and protect the taxpaying public. To date, Congress has failed to provide low- and moderate-income workers with subsidies that effectively promote retirement saving, while allowing the wealthy to use retirement accounts to reduce taxes on investment income, exacerbating wealth inequality. The SEC and DOL could make matters even worse by giving the green light to opaque alts that wealthy insiders can use to further game the system, while ordinary retirement savers are lured to invest in underperforming, high-cost, and inappropriately risky investments.   

There is a danger that some individual retirement savers will face costs and risks they are unaware of through investing in riskier assets. There is also a larger-scale risk that deregulation will fuel a speculative “bubble” in alternative markets. 

Update: On March 24, 2026, Secretary Mullin was confirmed by the Senate to serve as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) joined most Democrats and Independent Senators in voting against his confirmation; Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) voted in favor.

Timeline: 

March 9, 2026: Trump formally nominated Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) to serve as the second Homeland Security Secretary in the Trump administration.

March 5, 2026: Trump announced that Kristi Noem would be removed from her role as Secretary of Homeland Security. She was ultimately appointed to a new position as ‘Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas – Western Hemisphere,” an intergovernmental military coalition established by the Trump administration. Noem is the first Cabinet-level official to depart the Trump administration. The announcement of her removal came following protracted public outcry after immigration enforcement agencies under DHS killed and terrorized citizens and immigrants in aggressive mass deportation efforts and immigration crackdowns, or in immigration detention, and after months of heightened scrutiny on Noem’s oversight of FEMA, use of DHS agency funds, and more.

January 25, 2025: Secretary Noem was confirmed by the Senate.

President Trump has nominated South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to serve as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this role, if confirmed, she would have responsibility for a wide-ranging portfolio ranging from natural disaster response, prevention of terrorist attacks, customs, anti-trafficking, and immigration and border enforcement. DHS also has primary authority over a number of temporary work visa programs, and shares some jurisdiction over them with the Departments of State and Labor.

While Noem has limited experience working on many of the issues in DHS’s purview, in her Senate confirmation hearing, she committed to carrying out the Trump administration’s plans to accelerate deportations and radically reshape the U.S. system for seeking and obtaining asylum, as well as reexamining the use of humanitarian immigration protections and work permits.

Update: On March 4, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a coalition of unions filed an updated legal challenge against the Trump administration regarding the “Schedule Policy/Career” rule.

Timeline:

• February 5, 2026: OPM published the final version of their proposed regulation to create the “Schedule Policy/Career” designation for federal employees. This change will allow the Trump administration to reclassify about 50,000 federal employees, or 2% of the federal workforce, under a new category where agencies could “swiftly remove employees…without lengthy procedural hurdles” for reasons including “subversion of presidential directives.” The final rule does not direct which positions will be moved to the new classification; rather, according to OPM guidance, agencies identify positions to reclassify to OPM, which will review and make a recommendation to the President. President Trump would then need to issue a separate Executive Order designating those positions as reclassified under  Schedule Policy/Career. EPI submitted public comments opposing this rule in May 2025.
• April 18, 2025: Office of Personnel Management proposes rule to establish new designation to make it easier to fire government employees who are determined to “refuse to advance the policy interests of the president.”
• January 22, 2025: White House issues Executive Order on Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions within the Federal Workforce

President Trump issued an executive order indicating he will overturn regulations to clear the way for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages civil service (non-elected, non-military) employees of the federal government, to reinstate an employee classification known as Schedule F. The first Trump administration created the Schedule F designation in order to make it easier to fire federal workers in jobs that are normally apolitical, and therefore have civil service protections in their job. The Biden administration established protections to limit the use of this designation. By reinstating Schedule F, President Trump would be able to fire federal workers he deems disloyal, shifting the work of government away from the public interest and toward the president’s interests.   Under Schedule F, significant numbers of federal employees – who live and work across every U.S. state and territory – could be vulnerable to political attack, retaliatory termination, or termination without cause in order to fast-track hiring civil servants with certain political or ideological preferences.

For decades the NLRB had a narrow definition of joint employer, which did not account for employers’ growing use of outsourcing functions to contractors or subcontractors.  In 2015, the NLRB’s Browning-Ferris decision adopted a joint employer standard that required all firms that control the terms and conditions of employment to come to the bargaining table, ensuring that workers are again able to engage in their right to collective bargaining. 

In 2018, the NLRB issued a rule that narrowed the definition of joint employer to include only business that have “exercises substantial direct and immediate control over an employee’s essential terms and conditions of employment in a manner that is not limited and routine.” At the time, EPI estimated the rule would result in an annual transfer of $1.3 billion from workers to employers, because workers would not be able to bring all firms that influence their wages and working conditions to the bargaining table. The final rule went into effect April 2020.   

In October 2023, the NLRB rescinded and replaced the 2020 joint employer rule with a stronger rule where a firm may be found to be an employer where there is evidence of indirect and reserved forms of control, as long as those forms of control bear on employees’ essential terms and conditions of employment.  In March 2024, a federal district court judge vacated the 2023 rule before it could go into effect.  

By formally reinstating the 2020 joint employer rule, the NLRB has codified a joint employer standard that favors employers and is less protective for workers.  

Impact: The 2020 rule narrowed the definition of joint employer to firms that exercise direct and immediate control over a worker’s essential terms and conditions of employment. This narrow definition makes it harder for workers to bring all firms that have influence over their wages and working conditions to the bargaining table. In 2018, EPI estimated that the 2020 joint employer rule would cost workers $1.3 billion annually.  

Update: On February 26, 2026, the Department of Labor proposed a new regulation that would replace the 2024 Biden administration regulation with a weaker standard for determining independent contractor vs. employee status. The new rule, if adopted, would establish a version of the “economic realities test” similar to the one that the first Trump administration previously tried to finalize in a regulation shortly before they left office in 2021 (see EPI’s comment opposing that regulation here). 

Timeline:

May 2, 2025: the U.S. Department of Labor published field guidance for the agency’s enforcement staff, announcing that they would no longer enforce DOL’s 2024 regulation on independent contractor status under the Fair Labor Standards Act. This announcement also included reinstating an opinion from the first Trump administration’s DOL that gave on-demand/gig economy apps a wide berth in determining whether workers on their platforms were truly independent contractors or should be classified as employees. 

January 29, 2025: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted the Department of Labor’s request to delay oral arguments in a case challenging the 2024 rule. DOL has not yet dropped defense of the rule, merely delayed oral arguments while awaiting the transition of leadership at the agency. But it will be important to monitor whether they intend to continue defending the rule against litigation going forward.

The Department of Labor’s final rule, published in 2024, would have made it harder for employers to misclassify their workers as independent contractors. Workers misclassified as independent contractors lose out on critical protections, benefits, and labor rights including minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, the right to form a union, and anti-discrimination protections in most states. Additionally, these workers bear the full financial costs of Social Security and Medicare contributions. EPI recently updated an analysis of the pay and benefits of workers in 11 commonly misclassified jobs. A typical construction worker, as an independent contractor, would lose as much as $19,526 per year in income and job benefits compared with what they would have earned as an employee. A typical truck driver, as an independent contractor, would lose as much as $21,532 per year, and a misclassified home health aide would lose up to $10,214 per year.

Update: On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal basis for most of the Trump administration’s tariff increases throughout 2025 is invalid. The International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) had never before been used to justify unilateral executive action on tariffs.  

This ruling does not end the most damaging near-term economic consequences of the Trump tariff agenda – the radical uncertainty about what are the rules governing trade between the U.S. and trading partners. In fact, it might increase this uncertainty in the short-run, as a number of ad hoc trade deals rested on the premise that the Trump administration’s ability to impose and change these tariffs as they wished. 

There are other possible legal foundations for widespread unilateral tariffs. But these have their own legal uncertainties. For example, the president can impose 15% across-the-board tariffs in the face of a “large and serious” balance-of-payments deterioration, and the Trump administration could argue that the chronic U.S. trade deficit satisfies this criterion. But these tariffs would need to be re-authorized by Congress after just 150 days. 

In short, today’s ruling likely has some long-run legal importance, but it is unlikely to resolve much of the uncertainty about what the rules governing trade will be in 2026 and beyond, and this uncertainty is clearly not good for U.S. economic growth and stability. 

It is worth noting that in some ways the chaos in trade policy over the past year is a long-run consequence of Congress abdicating its proper role in setting tariffs and trade agreements and granting excessive power to the executive branch in these realms. In previous administrations, this ceding of power to the executive branch was done explicitly to grease the wheels for negotiating trade agreements with terms that would have had a hard time finding a Congressional majority. The fact that excess executive power in the past year has instead been used to tear up existing agreements rather than negotiate new ones is ironic, but is largely just another symptom of this larger trend.  

This decades-long process of steadily ceding more ground to the executive branch has led to trade policy that has not been responsive to the needs of typical working families. In the decades before the Trump administration trade policy reliably prioritized the desires of corporate owners and managers. The Trump administration has mostly aimed to punish foreign countries and give themselves opportunities to grant exemptions to companies and industries that curry their favor. Neither of those approaches have helped working families in the U.S., so if today’s decision leads to trade policymaking power moving away from the executive branch and back towards Congress, that could be a useful long-run development.

Timeline:   

August 29, 2025: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on virtually all U.S. imports was unlawful. Agreeing with the lower court’s ruling on this issue in May 2025, a majority of the judges wrote in their ruling that “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.” The enforcement of the judges’ order will not go into affect until mid-October. The Trump administration has appealed the decision to the Supreme Courton an expedited basis. If upheld, the United States will need to reimburse U.S. importers that paid tariffs under President Trump’s IEEPA declarations.  

In addition, on August 29, 2025, the earlier de minimis exemption from the tariffs expired, meaning import taxes will now be applied to goods being shipped to the U.S. with a value of less than $800. This affects roughly 1 billion packages annually received through the postal service, as well as goods that fliers import during air travel.

August 7, 2025: Despite being ruled unlawful by federal courts, the reciprocal tariff rates went into effect. If the Trump administration’s appeals fail, and the tariffs are affirmed to be by the courts, the U.S. government could be required to pay billions of dollars in refunds to businesses who have already paid the illegally imposed tariffs.  

July 7, 2025: President Trump extended the 90-day pause on the “reciprocal” tariffs (originally announced April 7) through August 1, 2025 from an initial expiration of July 9. Trump also announced that he sent letters to select countries communicating the tariff levels their exports to the United States could face after August 1. The announcement specifically names Japan, Korea, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Tunisia, Bosnia and Herzegovnia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Serbia, Cambodia, and Thailand as recipients of presidential letters, and pledges more letters to be sent “in the coming days and weeks.” The reciprocal tariffs threatened in these letters and first announced in the April 2 executive order under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) have been ruled unlawful in two separate court cases and blocked from implementation pending appeal; several other lawsuits over these tariffs are still being tried.

May 29, 2025: A second federal court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from collecting tariffs on the two plaintiffs who brought the case. The U.S. District Court judge issuing the ruling cited that the IEEPA does not give Trump the authority to impose tariffs outlined in the April 2 executive order.

May 28, 2025: The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that the Trump administration’s April 2 executive order on tariffs are illegal, stating that the tariffs exceeded his power under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). The court ruling also struck down separate tariffs Trump imposed on China, Canada, and Mexico, where the administration argued fentanyl trafficking as a justification to invoke the IEEPA. The ruling does not impact tariffs Trump has issued on steel, aluminum, and cars.

In arguments for this case, an attorney for the Trump administration said that this decision would “would kneecap the president on the world stage, cripple his ability to negotiate trade deals, imperil the government’s ability to respond to these and future national emergencies.” However, senior White House officials indicated that they attend to appeal the ruling, and would proceed with ongoing trade negotiations with the assumption that they will be successful on appeal and be able to continue imposing the tariffs.

May 9, 2025: President Trump and the government of the United Kingdom announced their intent to continue talks with the goal of agreeing to a new bilateral trade agreement, which would include rolling back some of the specific tariffs imposed on steel, aluminum, and cars produced in the U.K. in exchange for greater market access for U.S. agribusiness and tax and regulatory concessions to U.S. Big Tech companies. The announcement implies that the the 10% tariff President Trump placed on British imports will remain and that  a quota of 100,000 cars would see tariffs reduced from 25% to this 10% baseline, while UK-produced steel and Rolls Royce jet engines would see tariffs reduced from 25% to zero.  

The initial contours of this U.K. agreement indicate the difficulty in using this approach to advance a coherent strategy to rebalance U.S. trade relationships to support domestic manufacturing. If the Trump administration continues down this path, presumably, we would need to expect announcements in the near-term of nearly 90 individual “trade deals” with each major U.S. trading partner. This strategy represents a step backwards from the closed-door approach to negotiating trade agreements for special interests that has led to our current broken trading system. The Trump administration is side-stepping even the limited transparency and public accountability measures for formulating U.S. trade negotiating objectives, creating opportunities for self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and corruption.  

Ad hoc executive agreements like this do not carry the force of law of trade agreements ratified by Congress and could be reversed at the end of Trump’s presidential term, or sooner if the president has a change of heart. As such, uncertainty about the durability of such “deals” will leave doubts among businesses, investors, workers, and consumers desiring predictability to plan for their futures. 

April 2, 2025: Trump issued an executive order declaring a national economic emergency and levying tariffs on goods imports from virtually all U.S. trading partners, at a minimum of 10% but significantly higher for major trading partners.  

April 5, 2025: Tariffs go into effect.   

April 9, 2025: Trump lowers lowers most of the announced tariffs to 10 percent for 90 days, and increases tariffs on goods from China from 104 percent to 145 percent, including the 20 percent tariff announced in February. The announcement came after several days of alarm and plunging performance in the stock market and instability in the typically more-stable bond market. The original tariff announcement has also severely disrupted U.S. economic and diplomatic relations with other countries, many of which struggled to get responses from the White House on negotiations.      

On April 2, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled, “Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits.” The order declares a national economic emergency over large and sustained U.S. trade deficits—the difference between how much the United States sells in exports to the rest of the world and how much it buys in imports. Invoking a variety of emergency legal authorities, the order invokes significant taxes on goods that Americans purchase from abroad, also called tariffs.   

While the word “reciprocal” might imply these tariffs are meant to match in some way trade barriers to U.S. exports, the actual calculation of each country-specific tariff has no relation at all to genuine trade barriers. For each country, the “reciprocal tariff rate” is calculated as one-half multiplied by the bilateral trade deficit the United States runs with the country divided by the value of U.S. imports from that country. There is no information at all about legal or regulatory barriers or tariffs on U.S. exports that is reflected in this formula – it is functionally arbitrary in setting the reciprocal tariff levels.  

Impact:   

In 2024 the average effective tariff rate on goods entering the United States was less than 3%. The “reciprocal” tariffs will raise it to just under 19%. Tariffs will now cover functionally all goods imports into the United States – over $3 trillion. This level of tariffs will raise taxes on U.S. households by roughly $450 billion and will see a sharp reduction in both imports and exports.  

Tariffs can be a useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise. Without a strategic plan, and applied broadly across all sectors, these tariffs will not provide a meaningful boost to U.S. manufacturing. 

Update: On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the legal basis for most of the Trump administration’s tariff increases throughout 2025 is invalid. The International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) had never before been used to justify unilateral executive action on tariffs.  

This ruling does not end the most damaging near-term economic consequences of the Trump tariff agenda – the radical uncertainty about what are the rules governing trade between the U.S. and trading partners. In fact, it might increase this uncertainty in the short-run, as a number of ad hoc trade deals rested on the premise that the Trump administration’s ability to impose and change these tariffs as they wished. 

There are other possible legal foundations for widespread unilateral tariffs. But these have their own legal uncertainties. For example, the president can impose 15% across-the-board tariffs in the face of a “large and serious” balance-of-payments deterioration, and the Trump administration could argue that the chronic U.S. trade deficit satisfies this criterion. But these tariffs would need to be re-authorized by Congress after just 150 days. 

In short, today’s ruling likely has some long-run legal importance, but it is unlikely to resolve much of the uncertainty about what the rules governing trade will be in 2026 and beyond, and this uncertainty is clearly not good for U.S. economic growth and stability. 

It is worth noting that in some ways the chaos in trade policy over the past year is a long-run consequence of Congress abdicating its proper role in setting tariffs and trade agreements and granting excessive power to the executive branch in these realms. In previous administrations, this ceding of power to the executive branch was done explicitly to grease the wheels for negotiating trade agreements with terms that would have had a hard time finding a Congressional majority. The fact that excess executive power in the past year has instead been used to tear up existing agreements rather than negotiate new ones is ironic, but is largely just another symptom of this larger trend.  

This decades-long process of steadily ceding more ground to the executive branch has led to trade policy that has not been responsive to the needs of typical working families. In the decades before the Trump administration trade policy reliably prioritized the desires of corporate owners and managers. The Trump administration has mostly aimed to punish foreign countries and give themselves opportunities to grant exemptions to companies and industries that curry their favor. Neither of those approaches have helped working families in the U.S., so if today’s decision leads to trade policymaking power moving away from the executive branch and back towards Congress, that could be a useful long-run development. 

Timeline

August 29, 2025: The earlier de minimis exemption from the tariffs expired, meaning import taxes will now be applied to goods being shipped to the U.S. with a value of less than $800. This affects roughly 1 billion packages annually received through the postal service, as well as goods that fliers import during air travel.

August 1, 2025: Despite the justification for the tariffs being ruled unlawful by federal courts, Trump’s 35% tariff on imports from Canada went into effect. 

July 31, 2025: Trump announced a further 90-day delay on implementing the increased tariffs on imports from Mexico. 

May 28, 2025: the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that the Trump administration’s April 2 executive order on tariffs are illegal, stating that the tariffs exceeded his power under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). The court ruling also struck down separate tariffs Trump imposed on China, Canada, and Mexico, where the administration argued fentanyl trafficking as a justification to invoke the IEEPA. The ruling does not impact tariffs Trump has issued on steel, aluminum, and cars.

In arguments for this case, an attorney for the Trump administration said that this decision would “would kneecap the president on the world stage, cripple his ability to negotiate trade deals, imperil the government’s ability to respond to these and future national emergencies.” However, senior White House officials indicated that they attend to appeal the ruling, and would proceed with ongoing trade negotiations with the assumption that they will be successful on appeal and be able to continue imposing the tariffs.

March 6, 2025: the Trump administration delayed tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada until early April.

March 5, 2025: the Trump administration delayed tariffs on the auto industry until April.

March 4, 2025: The Trump administration implemented tariffs of 25% on goods imported from Mexico and Canada, with the exception of energy imports from Canada being subject to 10% tariffs. The administration also raised the previously announced tariff on goods imported from China to 20% from 10%.

February 7, 2025: President Trump paused his earlier suspension of the de minimis exemption on imports from China. His February 5 decision to end the de minimis exemption would have applied import taxes to goods with a value of less than $800 entering the US from China.

February 3, 2025: President Trump announced an agreement to pause the effective date of the new tariffs on both Mexico and Canada for one month pending further negotiations.

On February 1, 2025, the Trump administration announced tariffs of 25% on goods from Mexico and Canada – with a carveout for energy imports from Canada. They also announced a 10% tariff on goods from China. These amounts are over and on top of any existing tariffs.

Tariffs can be a useful policy tool when used strategically – we at EPI have provided a defense of tariffs (including some passed in the first Trump administration) as part of strategic plans to protect economically important sectors in the past. But without a strategic plan, and applied broadly across all sectors, these tariffs will not provide a meaningful boost to U.S. manufacturing. 

And these announced tariffs are extremely broad-based – in what follows all statistics on trade and tariffs are based on 2023 full-year data from the United States International Trade Commission (USITC). According to this USITC data, imports from China, Canada, and Mexico combined account for over 40% of all imports into the United States – this means that the tariffs will have a substantial negative effect on the U.S. economy. If, for example, import flows from these countries did not change in response to these tariffs, these tariffs would raise taxes faced by U.S. importers by roughly $230 billion. The consensus of empirical research into tariffs indicates that the vast majority of these costs would be passed onto U.S. households. In reality, imports from these countries will likely fall sharply in response to these tariffs, but this decrease in supply for the goods they are providing would significantly push up prices even for domestically-produced goods that compete with imports. In short, U.S. households will feel noticeably higher costs as a result of these actions even if imports fall.

The strategy behind these tariffs is far from obvious. For example, the volume of imports is far less important to the wellbeing of a country’s manufacturing sector than the size of the trade deficit (the amount by which imports exceed exports). In 2023, for example, the U.S. trade deficit with China was one third larger than the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico combined. Given this, it seems odd that an aggressive raising of tariffs sees China as the country facing the smallest increase. For another, the reasons given for the tariffs and the implicit conditions demanded to remove them have essentially nothing to do with the health of U.S. manufacturing or U.S. jobs. Instead, it is a mishmash of demands relating to immigration and flows of fentanyl. This intermingling of issues is a new and unwelcome distraction for debates over trade policy.

Extremely broad-based and indiscriminate tariffs have occasionally been defended on the grounds that they are undoing some of the damage done by trade policy in recent decades to U.S. workers. It is commonly thought that the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began an era where the interests of U.S. workers were shunted aside in issues of international trade. This is undoubtedly true in many ways.

But this week’s action pushes tariffs far above pre-NAFTA levels. For example, immediately before NAFTA the average effective tariff on goods imported from Mexico was between 2-3% – it will now stand at 25%. In short, the damage done by NAFTA to U.S. workers had far less to do with tariff levels than all of its other provisions, and raising tariff levels on nearly 40% of all U.S. imports will do little to undo this damage (in part due to the sharp retaliation this action will incur – retaliation that has already begun).

Further, it is worth remembering that NAFTA was re-negotiated under the first Trump administration, becoming the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) agreement. The actions of this week highlight that even the Trump administration sees its USMCA renegotiation as a failed and insufficient action. This week’s actions, implicitly constituting a second attempt by the Trump administration to re-orient American trade policy, are no more likely than the USMCA to provide any benefit to U.S. manufacturing and its workers.

Update: On January 22, 2026, the EEOC voted to rescind this harassment guidance. The Commission voted along party lines, and did not give members of the public notice or the opportunity to comment on overturning the guidance. Overturning the harassment guidance is yet another sign of the EEOC’s turn away from attempting to protect workers from gender-identity based harassment on the job, and, in the bigger picture, any attempt to enforce basic civil rights for transgender workers. 

The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 (in Bostock v. Clayton County) that firing an employee based on their sexual orientation or gender identity would violate their right to protection from sex-based discrimination.   

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued new guidance, entitled “Enforcement Guidance on Workplace Harassment,” and approved it by a 3-2 vote in April 2024. EEOC guidance provides more detail on agency policy and provides examples of how the policy would pertain to specific workplace situations. It is intended to provide clarity and guidance to employers about their legal responsibilities to provide discrimination-free workplaces, and to inform workers about their rights under the law. The guidance issued in 2024 included updates on how harassment of an employee based on their gender identity could constitute illegal, sex-based harassment, including repeated or intentional refusal to respect a transgender or nonbinary employee’s preferred name and pronouns.

The state of Texas sued the EEOC, seeking to block this guidance.  On May 15, a federal judge partially overturned guidance from the EEOC that explained how certain behavior toward employes based on their preferred gender identity can constitute illegal workplace harassment. Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that the EEOC’s guidance went beyond the authority of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Supreme Court precedent.

Impact: 70 percent of transgender respondents to a 2022 survey said that they had experienced workplace discrimination or harassment based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, including verbal, physical, or sexual harassment, being fired or not hired, or being denied access to workplace facilities or benefits. The court overturning these sections of the harassment guidance does not directly change the law, but it will make it harder for LGBTQ workers to find or experience fair, safe employment if the EEOC is unwilling to offer real enforcement of their rights. Attempts to carve out and narrow down who can be protected from gender and sex-based discrimination will also ultimately harm all workers, by giving employers more leeway to engage in transphobic or biased behavior.  

Impact:  

Given that this was not a policy action that the President has the authority to pass or enforce without an act from Congress, no major credit card companies have reportedly yet taken action to cap their rates. There is legislation that was already introduced in 2025 in both the House and Senate that would take steps toward capping rates, but so far Trump has not specifically pushed for that legislation to pass. It is also quite unclear why any credit card regulation should only last one year. That makes sense from a baldly political view – it’s the year before a mid-term election. Any rationale based on alleviating American families’ economic security seems harder to see. 

Putting aside the lack of impact so far from this particular announcement by Trump, it’s worth considering how a cap on interest rates – or any other actions by banks that may price-gouge consumers – would actually play out if Congress were to pass a bill. 

There is definitely lots of room for regulation of credit cards – including the interest rates they charge – in order to protect consumers. But 10% is an utterly arbitrary number. The profits that CC companies make depend both on the interest rates they charge and short-term interest rates more broadly in the market. But, these short-term rates can jump around a lot – so, any given interest rate cap can become much more or much less binding depending on this. Ideally, then, the interest rate cap should not be a flat number, but should be a number pegged off of the reference interest rate.   

Today, short-term interest rates remain on the higher end of what has characterized the past few decades. They are being kept up by continued inflation and large projected Federal budget deficits resulting from Trump administration policies. This means that a 10% cap would be extremely binding on credit card companies today, and threats that they might restrict credit to those with low-credit scores and thereby chase them into the arms of even higher-interest products like payday loans seem quite real.  

Other more effective policies to squeeze out excess profits from credit card companies and force them to lower interest rates could include:  

• Mandating reductions in the “swipe fees” charged by credit card companies. 

• Banning advertising of credit cards. 

• Creating a government exchange that allowed people to compare credit cards across 3-4 very simple metrics, to induce more competition that will force interest rates down. This kind of exchange would ideally be managed by a restored and more robust CFPB, for example.  

• Giving every American a payment account at the Federal Reserve that provided payment services (like debit cards and low revolving debt payments) at minimum costs. 

The real key to ensuring a decent economic life for all is running an economy where people don’t need to borrow so much money so regularly to get buy. At some point, there is no interest rate that will make your life sustainable if you continually have to carry short-term debt because your available resources don’t cover your costs. Serious proposals aimed at boosting affordability for American families involve policies to boost wage growth and offer more-generous public benefits. 

Lastly, to gauge whether the Trump administration is actually serious about cracking down on bad practices and profit-seeking behavior by banks, it’s important also to note how Trump has treated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB is a federal government bank watchdog that has returned more than $20 billion to households directly from banks stemming from robust regulation of fraud. Beginning with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, the Trump administration has effectively destroyed the CFPB in all but name for now. The first Trump administration also significantly weakened the CFPB – in 2015 (under the Obama administration) and 2021-2024 (under the Biden administration), annual payments from banks to households were about $4 billion per year. In 2018-2020 (under the first Trump administration), they averaged well under $1 billion. 

Update: On January 13, 2026, HHS rehired the hundreds of NIOSH staff who had been fired in the spring of 2025. According to the New York Times, the employees received a notice saying that the April 1, 2025 reduction in force notice was “hereby revoked.” NIOSH employees have spent months in limbo amid uncertainty from the Trump administration and ongoing litigation from worker interest groups over the gutting of the agency.

On April 1, 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the layoffs of 10,000 employees as part of the Trump administration’s reduction in force. The recent layoffs, combined with an additional 10,000 voluntary resignations, leaves the department with a 25% reduction in staff since President Trump took office.  The layoffs and voluntary resignations impact all divisions within the department, including the Food and Drug Administration, National Health Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which studies worker health and safety, was significantly impacted by the layoffs.  NIOSH is expected to see more than 800 employees–two thirds of the workforce–laid off in the coming weeks, according to CBS News. NIOSH activities include a wide range of workplace safety activities, from certifying the quality of personal protective equipment like face masks worn by firefighters, construction, and health care workers, to conducting safety and injury prevention research and health screenings for mine workers, to conducting research to help prevent hazardous chemical exposures in the workplace.  

Impact: The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health studies workplace health and safety and provides recommendations to prevent workplace injuries, illnesses and fatalities. Gutting NIOSH will make it harder for the institute to conduct and produce valuable research and guidance that foster safe and healthy workplaces.