The Trump administration on Thursday evening initiated a sweeping trade investigation targeting dozens of countries over their trade policies on goods made with forced labor.
The inquiry was part of an effort by the Trump administration to resurrect a global system of tariffs after President Trump’s first attempt was struck down by the Supreme Court last month. On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced another major trade investigation that could lead to tariffs, focusing on excess production in the factory sectors of more than a dozen major trading partners.
The new investigation will focus on the laws that countries use to regulate the use of forced labor in goods they trade, not their domestic situations. It will target 60 economies, including Algeria, Canada, Norway, Saudi Arabia, China and the United Kingdom, as well as the 27-country bloc of the European Union.
The United States has banned imports of goods made with forced labor for nearly a century. Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the United States passed a law that greatly expanded that scope. The United States forbid the import of any goods from the Xinjiang region of China, where accusations of forced labor have been rampant, unless importers provide documentation that their goods were made without it.
The trade agreements that the Trump administration has forged with dozens of countries in recent months have also compelled other countries to make commitments not to import goods made with forced labor.
“For too long, American workers and firms have been forced to compete against foreign producers who may have an artificial cost advantage gained from the scourge of forced labor,” Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said in an announcement Thursday.
The investigation is one of several that the Office of the United States Trade Representative is pursuing in an effort to set up a durable system of global tariffs by this summer. The administration has also proposed potential investigations into digital services taxes, pharmaceutical pricing and unfair trade in sectors like rice and seafood.
The investigations are being carried out under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a law that allows the United States to impose tariffs in response to unfair trade practices.
Administration officials have not clarified how high the new levies could be, or how the patchwork of investigations would apply to each country. They have said they would try to replicate their previous tariff structure, which was struck down after the Supreme Court ruled in February that Mr. Trump was not justified in using an emergency law to impose the tariffs.
Immediately after the Supreme Court decision was announced, Mr. Trump issued a new 10 percent global tariff under a different legal authority. He has threatened to increase those tariffs to 15 percent, but that has not yet gone into effect. But that tariff is time-limited, and is set to expire in July unless Congress votes to renew it.
The new Section 301 investigations are likely to be much more durable, though the administration is required to carry out an investigation and hearings before they can be imposed.
The new raft of investigations has caused frustration and angst among some trading partners, who are wondering how their businesses and economies will ultimately be affected.
Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry said in a statement Thursday that the U.S. government’s tariff announcement the day before had incorrectly said Singapore had a bilateral trade deficit with the United States. In reality, Singapore runs a trade deficit with the United States, and it had provided the U.S. government with that information, the trade ministry said.
The executive arm of the European Union, which was included in the “excess capacity” investigation announced Wednesday, said on Thursday that it was seeking clarity on how the moves would affect the trade deal it had made with the United States.
“We can only reiterate our expectation that the U.S. fully honor its commitments reflected in the E.U.-U.S. joint statement on this topic,” said Olof Gill, a spokesman for the European Commission, the E.U. executive arm. He said that the European Union “would respond firmly and proportionately” to any breach of those commitments.
He added that the European Union was a market-driven economy that did not consider itself a contributor to excess capacity, an issue that economists and policymakers typically link with China. Like the United States, the European Union has been struggling to cope with a flood of cheap Chinese cars and other exports.
“The European Union shares the United States’ concern regarding structural overcapacity in the global economy,” Mr. Gill said. “However, the sources of such overcapacity are well identified, and they do not lie in Europe.”
In remarks to reporters the day before, Mr. Greer had been unsympathetic, saying that the European Union had done “approximately zero percent” of what it was supposed to do to finalize its trade deal with the United States. He said that the European Union had legislation pending that would make promised changes to their tariffs for many months, and that there were a variety of other trade barriers where Europe had not taken action.
“We’re still waiting for Europe to do a lot of what it promised,” he said.
The investigations are also likely to rankle Chinese officials, who are busily preparing for Mr. Trump to travel to Beijing at the end of the month for a meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping.
In a news conference on Thursday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that China opposed unilateral tariffs and other restrictions. He called “overcapacity” a false premise and a “pretext for political manipulation.”
Some organizations that support domestic manufacturing and tariffs have praised the administration’s new investigations, while others that depend on global supply chains expressed concern.
Hunter Morgen, a lobbyist at Ballard Partners and a former trade policy adviser in the first Trump administration, said the Section 301 investigations would allow the administration “to methodically dismantle unfair trade practices.”
“What we’re seeing is a big pivot in authority to target these abuses, one by one,” he said.
But Stephen Lamar, the president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said that his group was discouraged by the proposed tariffs and that the administration should slow down and work with various stakeholders, including Congress. He likened the process to the administration trying to “glue together shattered glass in a messy fix.”
“We understand the administration is hurriedly trying to recreate the tariff rates it had sought to establish under a scheme now deemed illegal by the Supreme Court,” he said. “In this effort, the process increasingly feels like answers in search of an investigation rather than an investigation in search of answers.”
Koba Ryckewaert reported from Brussels and Tyler Pager from Washington. Amy Chang Chien contributed research from Taiwan.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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