Trump is trying to wage an ambitious trade war with a shrinking army

The staff of the tiny agency on the front lines of President Donald Trump’s trade wars has shrunk to its smallest size in two decades as its responsibilities balloon. Its work is suffering. Since Trump returned to the White House, the agency has rolled out new tariffs across the globe, launched trade negotiations with dozens of countries and reopened the signature pact governing North American trade. And after the Supreme Court struck down many of his initial tariffs, it has begun four probes into countries’ unfair trade practices to provide legal justification for new duties — with more threatened. The trade agency is attempting to do all of this with a staff that has dwindled by about a fifth, which along with a hiring slowdown and an intensely compressed schedule is leading to often slapdash work, according to eleven former trade officials from the Trump and Biden administrations who spoke to POLITICO. Some of the errors are embarrassing, including letters sent to foreign dignitaries announcing new tariffs that went out addressed to the wrong titles and genders, according to one former official. Others could undermine the president’s drive to impose new duties on dozens of trading partners. A recent investigation into whether other countries’ inaction on forced labor is giving their exports an unfair advantage was rushed out in a matter of months when previous investigations have taken more than a year. An announcement of a second investigation lacked basic details like what policies are harming U.S. businesses. Tariff challengers have already seized on similar weaknesses in court. “When you’re rushing like that, right, it’s kind of like crap in, crap out,” said one former Trump USTR official, who, like others interviewed by POLITICO, was granted anonymity to discuss the agency’s inner workings. USTR officials are getting “crushed” under the administration’s workload, the person said. The brain drain at the agency, including the departures of senior officials responsible for leading trade talks with key allies, is continuing even as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has pushed to expand the budget and stepped up hiring efforts. A USTR spokesperson said that under Greer’s leadership, the agency has “delivered an unprecedented volume of work on behalf of the American people that is thorough and outcomes-based.” Greer inherited an agency that was already shorthanded, and the Trump administration wasted no time in rolling out its new tariff-focused trade agenda. In the opening months of the administration, the president unveiled new tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, before rolling out sweeping new duties on almost every U.S. trading partner on April 2, 2025 — what the president dubbed “Liberation Day.” But the Liberation Day rollout was filled with errors. In addition to slapping tariffs on an uninhabited island filled only with penguins, which was roundly mocked in the media, the administration sent letters informing countries of their new tariff rates that contained the wrong genders and titles for foreign officials, said the first former official. The calculation for assessing the tariff rates, which USTR eventually published on its website, showed a simple back-of-the-envelope formula based on countries’ trade surpluses with the U.S., an embarrassment for an agency that prides itself on its data-driven, reasoned trade analysis and deep technical knowledge. The episode “made USTR look like a joke,” the former official said. The Supreme Court in February struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariff regime, leaving USTR to come up with alternative legal justifications for imposing sweeping duties. More serious than the embarrassing mistakes, former officials said, is that the agency has been rushing out the reports and announcements that are used to create those justifications, potentially handing tariff challengers legal ammunition. A March announcement of a probe into countries’ manufacturing overcapacity