Commerce Secretary Lutnick says tariff exemptions for electronics are only temporary [View all]
Source: ABC News
April 13, 2025, 11:17 AM
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the administration's decision Friday night to exempt a range of electronic devices from tariffs implemented earlier this month was only a temporary reprieve, with the secretary announcing that those items would be subject to "semiconductor tariffs" that will likely come in "a month or two."
"All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored. We need to have semiconductors, we need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels -- we need to have these things made in America. We can't be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us," Lutnick told "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
He continued, "So what [President Donald Trump's] doing is he's saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. So these are coming soon."
The administration's clarification comes after a U.S. Customs and Border Protection bulletin was posted Friday night outlining key electronics -- smartphones, computers, solar cells, flat-panel TV displays and semiconductor-based storage devices, among others -- would be exempt from the tariffs announced since April 2. That meant those products would not be subject to steep tariffs on Chinese imports, nor the global 10% tariff rate President Donald Trump had imposed.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/commerce-secretary-lutnick-tariff-exemptions-electronics-temporary/story?id=120752319