Project 2025's USRTA: A Blunt Tariff Law That Never Passed, and the Real China Challenge
Project 2025 proposed a unilateral U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act (USRTA) to match partner tariffs — projecting $70.6B and $25.3B deficit reductions with China and the EU. The USRTA was never enacted; the Trump administration instead pursued ad hoc tariffs via IEEPA and negotiated a July 2025 US-EU framework. Manufacturing employment declined after reciprocal tariff announcements in April 2025 (source: WCVB report, Feb. 2026), exposing the real cost of tariff-first policy without labor safeguards.
Project 2025's USRTA proposal is a vivid example of a trade-policy idea that was never implemented — but whose underlying logic is already in play through other tools. Rather than passing a single law to match every trading partner's tariff rate, the Trump administration applied tariffs case-by-case under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and Section 301, and in July 2025 negotiated a framework agreement with the European Union rather than triggering the USRTA's automatic escalator. The USRTA remains a paper proposal, but its core assumption — that trade deficits can be cured by tariff math alone — is still guiding policy.
That assumption is dangerous. The projected $70.6 billion deficit reduction with China under Scenario Two treats tariff rates as if they exist in a vacuum, ignoring that supply chains, currency manipulation, and suppressed labor costs drive far more of the deficit. And the real-world result of blanket tariff announcements in April 2025 was a decline in manufacturing employment, as reported by WCVB in February 2026. Blunt tariffs raise input costs for domestic producers, punish exporters, and hit allied countries harder than the intended target.
A fair-trade alternative would put enforceable labor and environmental standards — not tariff math — at the center of any reciprocal arrangement. Instead of matching China's tariff wall, demand that China end forced-labor supply chains, enforce ILO core standards, and open procurement to fair bidding. Use the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act as a floor, not a ceiling. Tie any tariff reduction or increase to verifiable improvements in working conditions and environmental protections. That is how you fight a race-to-the-bottom: not by mirroring it, but by raising the floor for everyone.
Table 5's catalogue of Chinese economic aggression — 60+ tactics from cyber-espionage to debt-trap diplomacy — is a useful diagnostic, but it is not a policy. Responding with a weaponized tariff checklist ignores the domestic industrial-policy gap. The real answer is massive public investment in clean-energy supply chains, semiconductor fabrication, and advanced manufacturing here in the U.S., paired with multilateral enforcement of trade rules against state-subsidized dumping and intellectual property theft. The USRTA was the wrong tool; the debate should be about the right one.
The humanitarian alternative
Replace the USRTA framework with a trade policy centered on enforceable labor and environmental standards. Specifically: (1) Require any trade agreement to include binding commitments to ILO core labor standards and Paris-aligned climate obligations; (2) Expand supply-chain transparency mandates (e.g., UFLPA enforcement) to cover all imports linked to forced labor; (3) Use targeted anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations for demonstrated harm, not blanket tariff hikes; (4) Pair trade enforcement with domestic industrial policy that funds worker retraining, sectoral wage boards, and public investment in critical industries — so that workers benefit, not just the trade ledger.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Adopt a comprehensive policy response to Chinese economic aggression as categorized in Table 5 (e.g., anti-dumping, IP enforcement, export controls). Repeal/revise specific tariff actions and export controls; rescind executive orders and agency rules; requires congressional action for statutory changes.
Reversing it is step one. The forward agenda — what we build so it can’t recur — is in Answers to this entry →
Grounded in
- FOREIGN TRADE BARRIERS - USTR
- How China's Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and ...
- Made in China 2025: Evaluating China's Performance
- Joint Statement on a United States-European Union Framework on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade
- Tracking Trump's Trade Deals
- Fact Sheet: The United States and European Union Reach Massive Trade Deal
- Policy and Supply Chain Tracker
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 26: Trade (pp 806-810)"— 773 — Trade the American President, and then under Scenario Two, in which the U.S. matches the tariffs of partners that refuse to lower their tariffs. Columns 2 and 4 in Table 4, when the USRTA is applied first to Communist China and then to the EU, show the largest absolute dollar reductions in bilateral trade deficits. This results in bilat - eral deficit reductions in Scenario One of $18.5 billion for China and $8.0 billion for the EU. In Scenario Two, the impacts for Communist China and the EU are substantially larger: $70.6 billion and $25.3 billion, respectively. Note further that the largest relative dollar reductions in percent terms come from applying the USRTA first to India and then to Taiwan and Vietnam. For exam- ple, if India were to reduce its tariffs to U.S. levels, as in Scenario One, this would reduce the bilateral trade deficit with India by 24 percent. If the U.S. raised its tariffs to mirror India’s levels, the result would be a far more dramatic 88 percent SCENARIO ONE/colon.tab PARTNER COUNTRIES MATCH U/period.tabS/period.tab TARIFF RATE SCENARIO TWO/colon.tab U/period.tabS/period.tab MATCHES PARTNER TARIFF RATES Country Projected Change in B…"