Project 2025's Trade Decoupling: Why Cutting Ties Hurts Workers More Than China
The chapter argues further negotiations with China are fruitless and dangerous, urging blanket tariffs, de minimis closure, procurement bans, and financial disengagement to decouple economically. These measures risk regressive consumer price spikes, supply shocks for essential goods (e.g., electronics, medicines), and diplomatic breakdown without guaranteed labor or environmental gains—yet the chapter omits the costs to U.S. households and workers. (Source: Chapter 26, pp 820-822; PIIE on Phase One shortfall; EO on de minimis closure, 2025; Rethink Trade on USMCA job trends)
Project 2025's trade chapter frames all negotiation with China as a trap—a 'bad faith' cycle that rewards CCP aggression and weakens U.S. manufacturing. It cherry-picks the failed Phase One deal (where U.S. exports fell 43% short of commitments, per PIIE) to argue that only unilateral decoupling works. But this erases the real choices: robust enforcement of existing labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, not abandonment of talks.
The chapter's laundry list—blanket tariffs on all Chinese goods, bans on state-owned enterprise procurement, drone and app prohibitions, financial disengagement—treats low-income U.S. households as expendable. Tariffs function as a regressive consumption tax; closing the de minimis exemption (enacted by early 2025 via executive order, per the tracker) will raise prices on essentials from electronics to medicines. Workers in import-exposed sectors may find tariffs don't automatically restore jobs—the 2025 USMCA review shows North American integration deepened, yet U.S. manufacturing jobs fell by 91,000, per the Rethink Trade report.
A fair-trade alternative would restore negotiation leverage by conditioning any tariff relief on enforceable labor rights—using the USMCA's Rapid Response Mechanism as a template globally—and pairing decoupling with targeted industrial policy (buy-American provisions, subsidized retraining, supply-chain transparency). The answer to China's economic coercion is not isolation but coordinated, multilateral pressure backed by domestic investment in clean energy and advanced manufacturing, as the Ex-Im Bank's climate-aligned financing could support.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Rescind tariff proclamations under IEEPA and Section 301 President can revoke executive orders imposing tariffs; Congress could amend Section 232 or 301 to limit authority. Supreme Court Feb 2026 ruling partially blocks IEEPA tariffs.
- Rescind EO closing de minimis exemption and withdraw CBP rule President can rescind the early-2025 executive order; CBP can withdraw implementing regulations. Congressional Review Act could disapprove if rule finalized after May 2025.
- Rescind EO banning Chinese state-owned enterprises from procurement; FAR Council reverse rule President can rescind executive action; FAR Council can withdraw rulemaking. Buy American Act amendments may be needed for full reversal.
Reversing it is step one. The forward agenda — what we build so it can’t recur — is in Answers to this entry →
Grounded in
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 26: Trade (pp 820-822)"— 787 — Trade attempts to negotiate with the CCP to strategically decoupling economically and financially from Communist China. The Fruitlessness of Further Negotiations. If the past is prologue, and as we learned during the Trump Administration, any further negotiations with Com- munist China are likely to be both fruitless and dangerous: fruitless because the CCP now has a very well-established reputation for bargaining in bad faith and dangerous because as long as the CCP’s aggression continues, it will further weaken America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base and global supply chains. The record regarding Communist China’s bad-faith negotiating is clear. In September 2015, President Barack Obama stood with Xi Jinping in the White House Rose Garden where Xi solemnly promised not to militarize the South China Sea and agreed that Communist China would not conduct knowingly cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property. 31 Within a year, the first promise would be broken. 32 As for Communist China’s cyberattacks on American busi - nesses, they have never stopped. Upon taking office in 2017, President Trump put on hold his 2016 campaign promise to put high tarif…"