A (2:56)

Right.

B (2:56)

And that also reminds us that there's always opportunities for fraud in this game and other people will invent new schemes to get the money back as well. But so far I think it's off to a decent start, but not perfect. But it is by no means a disaster.

C (3:13)

Scott, what are you tracking here?

A (3:15)

Well, after many years in the consumer products business, refunds and returns are a normal part of operations for almost any business, particularly any retail business. And the government is no different here in terms of they're in the business of refunds when it comes to income taxes and lots of fees that they collect. So the quality and consumer satisfaction with refunds tends to boil down to two things. One is how good are the systems in the first place, and the second is how well prepared is the person seeking the refund. On the private sector side, the company that is rated by consumers as having the best process is no surprise. Costco. Now, Costco has a lot of advantages. One is they know their customers. Because you buy a membership to shop there, they have a fairly generous policy which is if you're not satisfied, you bring it back and they'll give you your money. So the policies are good. The ability to identify the purchaser is sort of rock solid, and they're just the nicest people to deal with. When you do this now, you usually have a receipt or something like that, but they get very high marks. There's a range of others, and we'll see if the federal government can get closer. But a lot of this turns on how well prepared the person claiming the refund is to get it. As Bill correctly points out, there's a long standing process. If you paid the tariff, you can collect a rebate or refund on it if the tariffs are fundable. But if you didn't pay it, then someone else is the importer of record and someone else can collect, but not you. So they'll sort it out.

C (4:54)

I mean, is the train fully in motion at this point? Is there still a possibility that the White House will pursue some sort of legal option to halt refunds or limit them in some ways?

B (5:05)

There's been a pressure option, I would say, rather than a legal option. Trump has said he will look favorably on companies that don't ask for refunds.

C (5:13)

I saw that. And a few haven't sought them yet.

B (5:18)

Some big ones so far have not, although I wouldn't say that they never will. They just haven't yet. So there's an element of pressure here. There was expectation beforehand that the government would resort to legal obstacles and make it more difficult for you to get the money and discourage you from applying. So far, aside from Trump's statement, that doesn't seem to be happening. But I don't think the door is shut yet. We'll have to watch that and see.

C (5:46)

Scott, do you have any different take on that?

A (5:48)

No, I think that's right. And look, they're grumpy about it because they disagree with the decision in the first place, so they're not over that. But they're going to allow the process to work. They've got a few other things to work on in the meantime.

B (6:00)

And there appears to be a definitive or semi definitive number now. People seem to be settling at 166 billion billion with a B as the amount of money that's going to have to be given back. And it'll be interesting to see how much of that, you know, a year from now, we'll see how much of that is actually refunded and how many people didn't bother to come in or forgot that they had paid and just, you know, didn't get to it. Yeah.

C (6:23)

And not to put you on the spot here, but any guesses on. On the timeline for companies actually getting refunds?

B (6:29)

Oh, what did the customs say, 60 to 90 days, something like that. But that's from the date of when you request.

A (6:36)

Right, Right.

B (6:37)

Some people have complained about this. This could have been automatic because the data that you have to submit to get your refund is data that Customs already has. And people have pointed out that they could just automate the whole thing if they wanted to, and they're not doing that. I can't say that I blame them entirely. I mean, if you want your money back, it's not really a heavy lift to say you have to, you know, you have to send an email in and ask for it, you know, or go into the portal and make an application. The data they're asking for appears to be the data that you've already supplied before, so you should still have it. I mean, it doesn't strike me as

A (7:11)

a heavy lift for either party. Yeah, right.

B (7:14)

Yeah.

C (7:15)

Okay. Well, you can count on us returning to this in a future episode. But for now, I want to turn to Trade Over Aid, a new initiative from the Trump administration aimed at encouraging countries to adopt what it calls pro business reforms to their aid programs. This initiative is expected to be formally rolled out at the United nations later this month. And ahead of that launch, it has been reported that Secretary Marco Rubio sent a cable directing U.S. diplomats to encourage senior foreign officials to sign on to the effort. So let's start with the basics. Scott, what exactly is this initiative and what is the administration trying to accomplish here?

A (7:51)

Well, it's a declaration of principles as it's expressed in the State Department's messaging. And first, I'm making two points. One is that they're saying that if you want to grow your economy, free market formulas tend to work the best. Limited regulation, low taxation, private property rights, contract sanctity, honest judiciary. Those kinds of things are part of the recipe for economic growth. And that generally mutually beneficial trade is a good way to get economic development. They are specifically downplaying the role of foreign assistance. And so that's what, what's really different. The State Department in the past in most administrations were strong advocates of trade agreements. And most State Department officials, whether ambassadors or people in the C Street headquarters on the economic side tended to see open markets as a recipe for growth and that good disciplines in pro market measures and in openness to trade tended to leave countries with better economic results. So there's a pro trade bent to the State Department. Right. For most administrations. At the same time, a lot of aid flowed through the State Department and usaid, which is not flowing anymore. So.

C (9:12)

Right.

A (9:12)

Of course, one of the distinctions they're making here is don't expect that USAID spigot to be turned back on anytime soon. We're going to focus on trade now. If you want to really do trade instead of aid, it'll take some lifting. It always has. In the past, there were a couple of good examples, bipartisan examples with the Western Hemisphere. After investing a lot of political capital in the ratification of nafta, Bill Clinton's administration tried to move to a Free Trade Area of the Americas. They did this sort of the top down approach and had a very successful Miami conference with all the leaders of the Western Hemisphere. And I think the only unfortunate mistake was they set a 10 year time frame for the negotiations which most of the leaders of those countries took as an eight year paid vacation. And the world had changed pretty significantly by the time they got back. After eight years and the eight years after 1994, it was really different world by 2002. Having said that, the bottom up approach was practiced by the next administration, George W. Bush, after being governor of Texas, after working with Senator Lloyd Benson and ultimately the Treasury Secretary, Lloyd Benson, right. On matters of concern to the Texas economy and helping his father negotiate the original nafta, being in the White House off and on at the time and experiencing all this, knew it was very important to the Texas economy and he pushed it very strongly. And that was a more bottom up approach. USTR Zoellick and the two USTRs that followed him, Rob Portman and Sue Schwab, all were very active in an agenda of free trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere. Having worked on those, I can validate the effort that went into them. The political capital went into them. I have to say there's less to show for it than I thought there would be a couple decades later. But having said that, the trade instead of aid has been tried. It takes a lot of political capital. You can make it work. And if this is more than just we're not going to do aid anymore, well, good, but it'll take effort.

C (11:22)

Yeah. Bill, how realistic is this idea and what's your expectation for partners around the world responding to this?

B (11:29)

Well, to the surprise of nobody, I think I'm more cynical than Scott is about it. Breaking news, I mean, intellectually, free markets, deregulation, this all makes sense and it can be a path to growth. It certainly has been for the United States and some other economies. But I think there's some problems with the argument, some practical ones and some, once again, I think it's a case of massive hypocrisy. First of all, all aid is not development aid. Some aid is humanitarian aid. Sure, the United States gives a lot of money for eradicated malaria, dealing with hiv. One of the most successful aid programs we've had, which was the George W. Bush program, the PEPFAR program, famine relief, this is humanitarian aid that we do because we care about other people. And a lot of that has been cut off. And so saying that trade is going to solve those problems, I think misses the boat completely. Trade is not going to solve famine in South Sudan. The rest is Sudan. You have to do a lot of other things and trade isn't going to do the job. Trade is not going to solve malaria. It's not going to make AIDS go away. So there's a place here, I think, for genuine humanitarian aid that this administration has slashed significantly. Second, this kind of reeks of hypocrisy. Frankly, if the idea is trade, not aid, trade means we need to buy their stuff. If you want to help developing countries develop, one of the things you do is you accept their imports. That is the opposite of Trump's America first trade policy, which is focused on limiting their imports and maximizing our exports. That is not the kind of trade policy that. That I think leads to the outcome that they're talking about. A trade policy that he says is a trade policy that's reciprocal. What reciprocal means of this administration is other people have to open their markets to our products, but we don't have to open our markets to their products. That is also not a path for development for these countries. I think the third thing, which is a little more philosophical and Scott and I can probably argue about this interminably.

C (13:42)

Please do.

B (13:43)

Is it's turned out over the last half century that we've seen there's another path to development that's different from the free market path. And that's the path pursued by first Japan and then the four tigers, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, and now China, which is a path basically creating comparative advantage through a combination of protection, subsidies and government guidance. In the case of Japan and Korea, I think in the case of China, it's government direction, not guidance. But regardless, it's basically a much more heavy handed, government guided approach. The government decides what it thinks is important. It helps companies establish themselves to make what they think is important. They protect that industry from imports and they give that industry subsidies to make it globally competitive. That's been spectacularly successful for those countries and it's been particularly successful right now for China. And we're paying the price. As we've discussed on past episodes, with trying to deal with Chinese overcapacity, I raise this because it's a different development model. And I think over the years we've been through a number of different philosophies about this. The 50s and the 60s were the era of import substitution policies. The idea being that developing countries should create industries of their own that will substitute for imports, and they would do that via protection. That by itself turned out not to be a very successful strategy. The Japanese initially, and then the other Asian countries tweaked it and turned it into what for them was a very successful strategy that has promoted growth and development and moved those countries into a whole different column, out of the poor column and into the middle class and developed country columns. Whether really the least developed countries, particularly in Africa, can do that is an open Question. I think the obstacles to them doing that are far higher than the obstacles for the Japanese who, while they had a war destroyed economy essentially in the 50s and 60s, they had the capability, they had the talent, they had the knowledge and the history that would enable them to recover. A lot of really poor countries have none of that and they don't have the resources either. So it may not be a model that's suitable for everybody, but if you look around the world, I think you're seeing more countries thinking about that model, which is also, I mean, it's not a model that depends on foreign aid, but it's not a model that depends on the free market either. So it's fine that we're articulating the model that we believe in and the model that's worked for us. I think it's probably an act of hubris to think that the same model will work for everybody.

A (16:34)

Bill, I think you're right that one size doesn't fit all and that this very successful sort of state directed growth models has worked very well within the Asian economies you mentioned. In my view, import substitution never really lived up to its press clippings and began to fail spectacularly in the era of supply chains and bilateral free trade agreements that opened markets to industrial goods. So there needs to be something else. And I do think that in the case of Africa, that something else is probably not trade with the US Everyone supports agoa, we'd like to think it's a great idea, but it doesn't seem to take hold anywhere above the levels that it's basically been stuck at for the last 10 or 15 years. So there's something else needs to happen. For me, in Africa, it is the barriers between neighbors that is the greatest restriction and not the inability to trade from the poor south to the rich north. But it's right to tailor the approach. Every country is different, every country has different institutions, and different approaches will be more or less successful based on that. So there are a few things that do work almost everywhere. One of the things that the US did very well in the Western Hemisphere was embed these so called transparency chapters, which was for practical purposes reading the Administrative Procedures act into domestic law. And often it cleaned up the regulatory process in a lot of countries, including Mexico, where nobody could figure out regulations would just be issued and suddenly instantly applicable. And the idea of notice and comment rulemaking was unknown. And so every business in Mexico benefited from that being part of the transparency chapter of nafta. So there are a few elements that technically speaking were Quite effective and effective almost everywhere they were implemented. But I do agree with you that there are some approaches that countries have made more successful via intervention. And I think that's what's given support to President Trump's interventions in the US Economy. So there's no single answer to.

B (18:46)

There's an interesting case study that's worth noting. This is sort of an historical one. But the Malaysians thought about what they wanted to do on this stuff, and they decided in the automobile sector they would make their own car. And they started from scratch. And they made the Proton, which was a successful car in Malaysia because they encouraged everybody to buy one and I assume had tariffs on everybody else's cars. But it never got beyond Malaysia, which limited the company's growth. Thailand, which is a neighbor, more or less. Well, actually, it is a neighbor, took a different approach, which was not how do we make our own car, but how do we integrate our manufacturers into Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi supply chains, or Chrysler and Ford and GM supply chains. How can we get our people who make parts and components integrated into their supply chains? And they did a remarkably good job of that. And the result is you have a thriving Thai industry in auto parts. You don't have a Thai car, but the Thais figured out that they didn't need that.

A (19:49)

And they have a lot more workers in the industry because the components business is bigger than the finished product business.

B (19:56)

Well, they understood that it's a supply chain world, which is exactly what Scott was talking about. And the way to grow often is to integrate yourself into successful existing supply chains. So that's a lesson there. I agree with Scott that it's harder in Africa and internal barriers are hard for years. I don't think this is as true anymore as it used to be. But if you wanted to fly from Nigeria to Kenya, you had to go to London and then come back because there weren't planes that went west to east. They're getting over that now. And the African Continental Free trade agreement, the AfCFTA, which has now been signed by every nation in Africa except for one, as I recall, unless they've come on board in the last few months, is going to help break down those barriers. It's got a secretariat. This is a slow process, and as Scott pointed out, it's going to take a while for this to bear fruit. But the Africans understand that internal barriers are part of the problem, and I think they're working hard to reduce those. And that makes it better for everybody. It doesn't just make it better for them, it makes it easier for us to sell there and it makes easier for other countries to trade back and forth with Africa.

C (21:08)

Okay. Well Bill, I could have sworn I saw you pulling a Proton into the CSIS garage a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I was mistaken.

B (21:15)

Just quick record, I have an American car made in America, a cool American car.

C (21:21)

I have seen it. Just quickly here on the trade over aid declaration of principles. Scott, practical implications of this, I mean this is a non binding. They're trying to get nations to sign onto this. But are there any practical implications of this at this stage?

A (21:34)

I saw this as mostly expectation setting.

C (21:37)

Yeah.

A (21:37)

They chose a kind way to deliver the message of you're not getting any money.

C (21:41)

Yeah, okay.

A (21:42)

Yeah, yeah, maybe it'll be more than that, but I'll be surprised. We'll see.

B (21:47)

And it's easy to show that money has not always been a successful strategy. I mean I think PEPFAR has been a very successful program. But there was an interesting study done a while back who looked at Chad country in basically more or less the center of Africa, which received substantial funding to establish health clinics throughout the country. And the study determined that 99% of the funding did not get to its destinations. It ended up in basically corrupt activities. Swiss bank accounts for various leaders and things like that. If you don't have proper procedures, if you don't have rule of law, if you don't have guardrails in your economy, if you don't have a system of integrity in the way the government operates, the aid is going to go awry even if it's well intentioned. And so you know, when the administration says there's been waste, they're not wrong about that.

C (22:38)

Yeah.

A (22:39)

But and even aside from corruption, there is always the bureaucratic sort of problem of creating the self licking ice cream cone.

C (22:47)

Yeah.

A (22:47)

Of administering the program in such a way that it's really good at solving the same problem it did a year ago with the same support staff and the same vendors, but they really can't do much of anything else. So yeah, it's got a number of problems.

B (23:00)

In the same study, Kenya became modestly famous as a country that managed to get money, I think from the World bank by making the same promise three separate times. And the bank bought it every time

A (23:11)

to rack it all the way around.

C (23:14)

All right, Bill, I want to stick with you to close out the show today and I want to get Your takeaways from U.S. trade Rep. Greer's testimony before the Ways and means Committee on April 22 at a hearing that was focused on the President's trade agenda. So what were your key takeaways from what you heard at that hearing?

B (23:30)

Well, the first one was that it was calm almost. I think half the Cabinet appeared before the Congress this week in various topics, various agencies.

C (23:39)

All those hearings were calm.

B (23:40)

Yeah, yeah. Well, Robert Kennedy's were not, and several of the other ones were not. Ambassador Greer's was. He lucked out.

C (23:49)

Why was that?

B (23:50)

There was only one with Ways and Means. The Finance Committee hearing, which was supposed to be on Thursday, was canceled because the Senate had its one of its periodic budget voteramas and didn't adjourn until a quarter of four in the morning. And Senators being senators, they all wanted to go home and take a nap. And so the hearing has been put off. So there's only one hearing.

C (24:11)

I don't blame him.

B (24:11)

For him to look at it appeared to be fairly calm and fairly predictable. He, of course, talked about how successful the Trump trade policy has been. If you look at the data that he presented, he used an adroit use of numbers. It's a lesson for anybody that deals with statistics. In fact, one of the great rules of economic forecasting is give people a number or give them a date, but never give them both. And what Greer did was give them both, which led to, I think, people being able to pick the data apart. He said, for example, that productivity was way up in the fourth quarter of last year. Well, if you compare the fourth quarter of last year to the fourth quarter, 2024, he was right, although it was up a little bit less than he said. But if you compare the fourth quarter last year to the third quarter last year it was sharply down. So how successful the policy is depends on when you measure, and it also depends on what you're measuring. He got it right when he said that wages are up, which is good news. He did not, I think, mention that manufacturing employment is actually down, I think 80,000 or 90,000 year on year over the last year. And I think where reality ends up is that he has been reducing the deficit, although how much you reduce the deficit, again, depends on when you start counting. The year on year deficit from 25 was not that different. The China deficit was sharply down. Imports from China are now only 9% of our imports, which is the lowest they've been in, like, forever. Of course, there's a cost to that that we don't pay because we're exporting the problem, because what happens is the Chinese are now, you know, selling to everybody else, and now suddenly everybody else has the Same problem that we had. So we, we've dumped our problem on the rest of the world, which is ironic because in a sense the Chinese are dumping their economic problems on the rest of the world as well, just not us anymore. The overall deficit hasn't changed that much. And he kind of glossed over that point. The congressmen, I think, were not so much interested in that as they were in making particular points. The Democrats were really focused on how consumers can get the tariff money back. And of course that's a little unfair because that's not Greer's problem, that's customs problem and CBP's problem. But he was in the chair, so they asked him and he didn't have great answers for how they get their money back. And there has been some legislation I think we noted a couple weeks ago proposed. I don't think it will go anywhere that would require retailers to give the money back. And Scott's example about Costco was illuminating. They know who their customers are. They could probably do that if they were told to do it. I mean, they might do it anyway. But companies that are in retail, people just walk in and buy something. That's a monumental bookkeeping exercise. Try to figure out who bought what and how you can give them their money back. But that's where the Democrats focus, the Republicans focus a little bit more predictably on the plight of farmers, because a lot of them represent farmers and the farmers aren't doing so great. And everybody agreed that this is something that needs to be worked on. And they didn't press him too hard on exactly what he was going to do about it. But mostly it was complaining that we need to worry about the farmers. The chairman, Chairman Smith, opened with a lengthy comment on two subjects. One about the importance of working with Congress on usmca, which is, I think, an important point. And it's something actually just a plug here. We're going to be spending a good bit of May talking about usmca. We have some guests coming in a couple weeks in May, so stay tuned for deeper dive into USMCA in future weeks. The other issue that came up that intrigued me a little bit was Agoa, which was stressed by the House Republicans as a priority and accepted by Ambassador Greer as one of his top priorities, saying that he really wants Agoa extended. He is now at the point of saying that the Trump administration is in for a multi year extension. He didn't put a number on that, but multi year is better than the one year that he got. It expires again at the end of 2026, happy talk about how we all want to work together to achieve this result. And so we'll see. He did manage to say the deadly word reciprocal when he was talking about agoa, which gets back to what I was saying earlier. Reciprocal for this administration means they let our stuff in and we don't let their stuff in. And the whole point of AGOA is, and the reason it got such overwhelming bipartisan support from the beginning, is that it was designed to be, at one level, a gift to the African countries. It was designed to be a develop. Actually, it was designed to use trade, not aid, as a development support. But it was premised on we will help them by buying their stuff.

A (29:11)

It's a tariff preference act, really.

B (29:13)

Yeah. And, you know, putting as he did on the 39% tariff initially, I think it's come down now on Eswatini, which decimated their apparel industry. They had built up a substantial apparel industry in this small, landlocked southern African country thanks to Agoa and thanks to being able to get their textiles and apparel into this country. If he still wants to do that, then it may be a successful endeavor. But, I mean, the Africans are not dummies about this. An AGOA that doesn't give them any benefits and only gives us benefits is not going to be very well received in Africa, and it's not going to be very successful either. But it was no good that they focused on it. What they did not focus on, interestingly, was trade agreements. There seemed to be little or no discussion about trade agreements. I mean, the Biden administration didn't really pursue any. And you didn't find a lot of Democrats saying that we should pursue any. And I don't think there were many Republicans that said we need to do what Scott referenced Ambassador Zoellick doing when he was ustr. You need to get out there and negotiate. We didn't see a lot of that.

C (30:19)

Scott, your takeaways.

A (30:20)

Yeah, that was probably the unfortunate part of at least the Congress's role in the hearing is. Look, yes, it's one thing to be grumpy about lack of consultation. It's another thing to demand the administration take note of the Congress's powers and respond to the notion that trade negotiations and trade agreements are a priority. And we, the Congress, since we have the power to regulate foreign commerce, we want you to do it this way and get to work. And why aren't you? So I think there was an entirely too much sort of head nodding on, on the majority side about the President's program, which I thought Ambassador Greer defended quite well. He's a very professional, polished defender of the president's policies. So he did his job from that standpoint. But I continue to be kind of surprised that the Congress takes so little interest in this. It's something they could do to both for their constituents and for the country to both rein in the excesses, but also to advance a real agenda of open markets. They don't seem to take the slightest interest in doing it.

B (31:30)

Well, you know, there's an element of hypocrisy there, too, on the Congress side. They complain a lot about not being consulted. They complain a lot about Article 1, Section 8 being ignored and the President assuming powers that rightfully belong to the Congress. But then they don't do anything about it. And it seems to me if Congress wants to say we need to assert our authority, then okay, assert your authority. You know, legislate, pass something.

A (31:54)

Right. Amend something, do something.

B (31:57)

Yeah. They seem to be content to complain about it when, in fact, to the extent that power is being transferred to the executive, which it is, I think in this case in particular is their own fault.

A (32:08)

Yes.

B (32:09)

You know, they're letting this happen and they don't have to let it happen.

A (32:12)

Yeah. The president's taking their lunch money and they seem to be okay with that, which is unusual for Ways and Means members in my experience.

C (32:19)

I don't know if that'll change anytime soon. Trey. Guys, we're going to leave it there for today. We will, of course, be back next week with a new episode. Thanks to everyone for joining us, and we'll see you then.

A (32:28)

Thanks.

B (32:28)

Thank you.

C (32:37)

You've been listening to the Tray Guys, a CSIS podcast. For more audio content, visit csis.orgpodcasts thanks for tuning in.