President Trump has repeatedly promised that his steep tariffs would reduce U.S. imports, shrink the trade deficit and lead to a revival in American manufacturing.
So far, the opposite has occurred.
U.S. imports grew last year, and the trade deficit in goods hit a record high, data released Thursday showed, as Mr. Trump’s policies scrambled trade but did not halt it. That was consistent with other data suggesting that companies have rerouted orders and revamped supply chains to skirt tariffs but have not, so far, brought production back to the United States en masse. American manufacturers have cut more than 80,000 jobs in the past year.
High tariffs and unpredictable policy drove huge swings in trade last year. Companies stockpiled products ahead of tariffs going into effect, then halted imports. American investors bought and sold large quantities of foreign gold as a hedge against volatile markets.
But although hefty tariffs dampened purchases of imported cars, household consumer items and other goods somewhat, America’s trade with the world remained relatively robust. The United States imported chips to fill new artificial intelligence data centers and Americans snapped up foreign weight-loss drugs, all helping to buoy cross-border trade.
The total trade deficit, including trade in both goods and services, shrank slightly last year, as growth in exports narrowly outpaced growth in imports. But that was entirely the result of an expanding trade surplus in services. The trade deficit in physical goods, which has been Mr. Trump’s focus as he has sought to use tariffs to restore the U.S. manufacturing sector, actually grew in 2025.
Overall imports of goods and services increased 4.7 percent, to $4.3 trillion, in 2025, while exports rose 6.2 percent, to $3.4 trillion. The trade deficit — the amount by which imports exceed exports — was $901 billion, down from $903 billion in 2024.
The trade deficit grew sharply at the end of the year, rising 32.6 percent in December as imports rose and exports fell.
Tariffs did lead to drastic shifts in the countries with which the United States trades. Imports of goods from China tumbled nearly 30 percent, to their lowest level since 2009, as companies turned to factories in other parts of the world. But U.S. exports to China fell by nearly as much as the country — unlike many other U.S. trading partners — retaliated against Mr. Trump’s policies. The goods trade deficit with China shrank to $202 billion in 2025, the smallest in more than two decades and, for the first time on record, smaller than the deficit with the European Union.
But as Americans bought less from China, they bought more from the rest of the world. Trade deficits with Vietnam, Mexico, India and other countries were the largest on record.
The data has raised questions about whether Mr. Trump’s trade policy is restructuring the United States to be less dependent on imports, or mostly shuffling trade around.
Mr. Trump has said steep tariffs and new trade deals will boost American factory production, making the country less dependent on foreign goods. Many importers have responded to tariffs and the threat of them by adjusting the timing of deliveries, and the countries from which they purchase, at great cost and inconvenience.
Tariffs have also pushed up prices for American consumers, although by less than some economists initially feared. A study this month from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that American businesses and consumers have born most of the cost of the tariffs.
U.S. exporters, particularly farmers, have also been caught in the crossfire of Mr. Trump’s trade wars. U.S. soybean exports fell sharply last year as China boycotted that crop and bought instead from Brazil and other countries as retaliation for Mr. Trump’s tariffs. American soybean farmers exported only $17.5 billion of their product in 2025, down from $25.8 billion in 2024.
China stopped buying American farm products for most of last year until U.S. and Chinese officials agreed to a trade truce in late October. As part of that agreement, China pledged to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans last year and 25 million metric tons in each of the next three years. The 25 million metric tons is in line with what China has bought in recent years.
To help farmers deal with the fallout of the trade war, the Trump administration provided them with $12 billion in federal aid.
But whether the policies lead to lower imports, higher exports and a narrower trade deficit in the long run still appears something of an open question.
Bernard Yaros, the lead economist at Oxford Economics, said it was “a bit too early to tell what the lasting impacts of Trump’s trade policies are.”
He said U.S. imports were now hovering below their trend from the decade before Mr. Trump’s second term. Part of that was payback for the huge spike in imports at the start of last year, and part was the impact of tariffs had on the relative price of imports rising.
“We still need to see where imports settle once the ‘inventory effect’ from massive stockpiling in early 2025 wears off,” he added.
After Mr. Trump’s election, companies had rushed to bring goods into the country before tariffs took effect, causing imports and the trade deficit to soar.
Imports began to fall back after Mr. Trump announced global tariffs in April, including draconian levies on China. The president temporarily paused most of those tariffs to allow for trade negotiations, but reimposed them at lower levels in August. As of Jan. 19, U.S. consumers faced an overall average tariff rate of 16.9 percent, the highest since 1932, according to calculations by the Yale Budget Lab.
The trade deficit briefly plunged in October, falling to the lowest monthly figure since June 2009. But much of that drop appeared to be the result of temporary fluctuations in trade, particularly in gold. The trade deficit rebounded somewhat in November before growing further in December.
The president has long seen trade deficits as a sign of a weak U.S. economy, and argued that high tariffs would encourage more U.S. factory production and cause the trade deficit to fall. Many economists disagree with a single-minded focus on the metric, saying that the trade deficit can fall for many reasons, not all of them good.
The tariffs have also shuffled U.S. trade with various countries. In particular, the trade deficit with China has shrunk, as companies rejiggered their supply chains in anticipation of higher tariffs on the country.
But Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that American tariffs on Chinese exports had not ended up being that much higher than tariffs on goods from other parts of Asia, raising the question of whether companies would continue moving supply chains out of China.
Mr. Setser said that the United States had also simply started importing more from elsewhere in Asia. The drop in the U.S. trade deficit with China was mostly offset by a big rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam, other countries in Southeast Asia, India and Taiwan last year.
In some cases, shipments to the United States from elsewhere in Asia have still come from Chinese companies. Chinese firms have set up new factories outside of China to be able to export to the United States without paying the higher tariffs. China’s trade statistics show that, while its trade surplus with the United States has fallen, its trade surplus with the rest of the world has soared, Mr. Setser said.
“The administration is trying to get far too much credit for shifting imports around a bit and moving to a world where Chinese content comes to the U.S. on a one-stop flight rather than on a nonstop,” he said. “The goods coming through Southeast Asia have enormously significant amounts of Chinese content.”
Trade from Asia remained strong in part because Mr. Trump chose to exempt electronics from his tariffs last year. The region continued to provide Americans with tax-free electronics, as well as semiconductors and other equipment necessary for data centers.
The administration also did not end up putting meaningful tariffs on foreign pharmaceuticals, and imports of drugs helped to push up the trade deficit.
Tariffs could undergo more changes in the weeks to come. The Supreme Court is expected to rule, potentially as soon as Friday, on the legality of many of the tariffs that Mr. Trump issued using a 1970s emergency law. Trump officials have said that if those tariffs were struck down, they would use other authorities to impose new duties to replace them.
Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the economy for nearly 20 years.
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