President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that will temporarily allow low-cost products from China to continue coming into the United States tariff-free.
The order reverses, at least for now, a decision that he made last Saturday, when he signed an executive order eliminating so-called de minimis treatment for goods from China. The de minimis rule had allowed products under $800 to come into the United States without being subject to tariffs and with less information given to customs.
That change, which went into effect Tuesday, meant that hundreds of thousands of packages coming into the United States each day from China were suddenly subjected to tariffs and requirements for much more information.
The swift change sowed confusion among retailers and shippers. Many sellers on e-commerce platforms were taken by surprise. The U.S. Postal Service temporarily stopped accepting packages from China on Wednesday, though by Thursday morning it said it would once again accept them.
In the order Friday, the president said that de minimis treatment would continue to be available for goods from China for now, but would cease once the secretary of commerce notified him that systems had been put “in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue.”
Timothy Brightbill, a trade attorney at Wiley Rein, said that the order “appears to concede, at least for now, that the United States does not have the systems in place it would need to collect tariffs on the enormous and growing number of de minimis shipments each year from China.”
Mr. Brightbill said he expected that the Commerce Department, as well as Customs and Border Protection, which processes imports, would make it a priority to ensure that these new tariffs could soon be collected. “Both the administration and Congress want to fix this loophole,” he said.
The Trump administration imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all imports from China beginning Tuesday, arguing that the country had not done enough to stop shipments of fentanyl into the United States. Mr. Trump had threatened 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, but decided to postpone those for a month after negotiating with those governments.
China responded to the tariffs with its own retaliatory measures, including tariffs that are set to go into effect next Monday.
