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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 did not initially identify any specific policies from trading partners that qualify as an unfair trade practice, said Ed Gresser, a former assistant USTR for trade policy and economics, who left the agency during the Biden administration. The omission could leave the probe more vulnerable to a legal challenge, he said.
Countries also pushed back against inaccurate information in that announcement. An initial version referred to Singapore — one of the investigation’s targets — as having a bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. of $27 billion in 2024. But that language was quietly removed from a later version after the Singaporean government pointed out publicly that it was, in fact, the U.S. that had a trade surplus of $27 billion with Singapore. USTR also quietly corrected the numbers it cited for both Indonesia and Cambodia’s trade surpluses with the U.S.
Tariff challengers are already filing court documents citing omissions in the USTR investigation into efforts to curb imports made with forced labor. The July report into countries’ forced labor practices, initiated under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and produced in just four months, lacked the depth featured in comparable reports from previous administrations, three former officials noted.
“It strikes me a lot more vulnerable to legal challenge than previous 301 reports have been,” said Gresser, who is now the vice president and director for trade at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Democratic attorneys general filed a suit earlier this month seeking to overturn the proposed duties tied to forced labor. “The USTR made no effort to link the scope of the tariffs to the scope of harm,” they wrote in their filing.
Burlap and Barrel, a vendor of imported spices that is also suing, noted that the USTR failed to provide a “reasoned, record-based explanation” for its tariff findings.
“You can tell they’re stretched,” said Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration economic official who is now a trade law professor at Georgetown Law. Officials are “not able to put in or do the level of detail that they’ve been able to do in the past.”
USTR’s staff of less than 300 people has always punched above its weight, almost all of the former officials noted. The Commerce and Treasury Departments, by comparison, count workforces of around 40,000 and 80,000 employees, respectively.
From 2023 to 2026, however, the number of USTR employees fell almost 20 percent, from 269 workers to 220, leaving it with the smallest workforce since 2005, according to data from the White House Office of Personnel Management.
The agency’s lowest staffing in more than 20 years continues a decline that began in the latter half of the Biden administration when the agency faced a staff exodus driven by frustration with the former president’s dormant trade agenda.
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USTR’s in-house expertise has only continued to dwindle in the second Trump administration.
The agency’s most senior official responsible for North American trade, Daniel Watson, retired just days before the White House formally launched a review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on July 1. Meanwhile, Bryant Trick, the top trade official for Europe and the Middle East is also set to retire in the coming months at a time when U.S. talks with Europe over its digital trade practices, pharmaceutical pricing and implementation of a bilateral trade pact are in full swing.
Officials that left the agency during Trump’s second term did not agree on a single driving factor behind the recent departures. The first former USTR official cited their dismay over Trump’s ties to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as a reason for their own departure. Others noted there was a cohort of staff nearing retirement age.
“I don’t sense that one can point to a morale problem or something like that,” a second former official said.
Greer, who served as chief of staff to Trump’s first-term trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, is widely respected at the agency, former officials said, and built up goodwill among staff for his handling of the administration-wide effort to cut the size of the government last year. USTR was spared from those cuts, which several former officials attributed to Greer’s assertiveness on personnel matters.
There is money available for USTR to staff up. The agency received $88 million in fiscal 2026, which should accommodate 274 employees, according toUSTR’s budget documents.Greer is also asking for $95 million in fiscal 2027 to beef up trade enforcement activities. The agency says the funding increase would allow for 301 full-time employees.
But it hasn’t been easy to hire.
Since Trump returned to office, the private sector has scrambled to bring on trade experts to help companies navigate the more complex tariff landscape, offering higher salaries than candidates and sitting officials can earn in government.
“It is no surprise that the private sector is eager to hire the well-regarded experts at USTR during this period of historic change in U.S. trade policy,” the USTR spokesperson added in a statement.
Three of the former officials said it is common for jobs to sit vacant for more than a year. One said they have seen the recruitment process drag on for two years, as the Executive Office of the President, which handles USTR’s hiring, prioritizes recruitment in other executive offices.
Shifts in human resources policies under Trump have also hurt recruitment efforts, two of the former USTR officials said, citing, in particular, new limits on remote work.
A flexible working environment “is one of the ways that you compete with better salaries and more certainty in other sectors,” one of the people said.
USTR is supposed to be a “nimble” agency, the person stressed — particularly so under Trump, where trade negotiations, investigations and new tariffs are rolled out on shortened timelines and responding to fast-moving developments in bilateral trade relationships.
“They’re being asked to do a lot,” the person said, but the hiring “system is just not set up to be nimble or to get results on any quick timeline.”
Paroma Soni contributed to this report.
