The White House cited these economists to justify its tariffs. They aren't thrilled.

Fri, Apr 4, 2025, 12:36 PM 6 min read

The emails started hitting Anson Soderbery’s inbox at about 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday night. An economist at Purdue University, friends and acquaintances were reaching out to let him know that the Trump administration had just cited one of his papers as grounds for the steep tariff rates it would impose on America’s trade partners, which the president had unveiled on giant poster boards during a Rose Garden speech hours earlier.

A few of the notes jokingly congratulated him. But how did he really feel? “Confused,” Soderbery told Yahoo Finance. After all, he said, his study had been written to discourage exactly the kinds of policies Trump was rolling out. Certainly, nobody from the administration had consulted with him.

“I don’t want it to turn into infamy,” Soderbery added, laughing.

Soderbery isn’t the only economist with qualms about how their work was used as part of the White House tariff push. And while the complaints of a few academics might not seem significant compared to, say, the stock market’s panicked stampede this week, they do raise questions about the rigor that went into planning America’s most sweeping import taxes in over a century.

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The White House has described its new tariffs as “reciprocal,” meaning they are supposed to match the trade barriers other nations erect against American companies. But in computing them, the administration did not actually match other governments tariff-for-tariff. Instead, it relied on some relatively simple math: It divided each country’s trade surplus in goods with the US by how much we imported from them, then cut that result in half as a “kind” gesture. (It also put in place a minimum 10% rate).

Take Vietnam. It sent $136.6 billion worth of goods to the US in 2024, running a $125.5 billion surplus, so it was hit with a 46% tariff — about half of a full “reciprocal” duty of 90%.

The administration did not explain how it arrived at its method until late Wednesday evening, hours after online sleuths had already begun cracking the code. By then, the reviews were already scathing, with many suggesting the president’s advisers had relied on a crude and arbitrary rule of thumb that had little to do with whether other countries were really putting in place hurdles to American products.

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“What extraordinary nonsense this is,” the economics journalist James Surowiecki wrote in a social media post.

Not so, Trump officials claimed. In a blog post complete with a bibliography and footnotes, the US Trade Representative said it had calculated “reciprocal” tariffs at rates that would eliminate the US trade deficit with each country, using a formula that was in fact more sophisticated than met the eye and took into account factors like how much imports would fall as duties rose and how much prices would increase for consumers. It just so happened that some of the key variables canceled each other out, leaving behind the simple long-division exercise that had been widely mocked.