Trump ends Chinese rate Maas in the law, which increases the costs of online goods

The Trump administration on Friday eliminated a Maas in the law that had enabled American shoppers to buy cheap goods from China without paying rates. The move will help us manufacturers who have had trouble competing with a wave of cheap Chinese products, but it has already resulted in higher prices for Americans who shop online.

The Maas, the de De MiniMis rule, allocated products up to $ 800 to prevent rates and other bureaucracy, as long as they were sent directly to American consumers or small companies. It resulted in an increase in individually addressed packages to the United States, sent many per air and ordered from fast-growing e-commerce platforms such as such as such as Shein and Temu.

A growing number of companies used the Maas in recent years to get their products to the United States without being confronted with rates. After President Trump had imposed tasks on Chinese goods during his first term, companies began to use the exemption to circumvent those rates and to continue to sell their products cheaper to the United States. The use of the Maas in the law occurred in the second term of Mr. Trump when he hit Chinese goods with a rate of at least 145 percent.

American customs and border protection processed a billion of such packages in 2023, of which the average value was $ 54.

In a cabinet meeting in the White House on Wednesday, Mr Trump referred to the Maas in the Maas as ‘a scam’.

“It’s a big scam against our country, to really small companies,” he said. “And we ended, we have put an end to it.”

Mr. Trump’s decision was partly related to concern about the use of the Maas in the Maas as a management for Fentanyl in the United States.

Due to the exemption, companies were able to send cheap goods to submit less information to customs officials than other standard shipments. Said the administration Drug traders “operated” The Maas in the Maas by sending forer chemicals and other materials used to produce Fentanyl to the United States without having to provide shipping information.

The growing use of the Maas in the law also endangered American jobs in storage and logistics. It encouraged Large American retailers To send more products directly from China to the consumer’s door, to avoid larger shipments that were subject to rates and then distributed through American warehouses and delivery networks.

Kim Glas, the president of the National Council of Textile organizations, which represents American textile makers and fought to eliminate the Maas in the law, said that “the American textile industry had destroyed.” Mrs. Glas said that unsafe and illegal products had allowed to flood the American market for years. More than half of all the minimis shipments on value contained textile and clothing products, she said.

“This rate Maas in the law has given China almost unilateral, privileged access to the American market at the expense of American manufacturers and American jobs,” she said.

But opponents of terminating the exemption complained that the move would considerably increase prices for American consumers, to harm small companies that had built their companies around the Maas in the Maas and had delayed the trade stream between the countries. The change is expected to weigh on airlines and private carriers such as Fedex and UPS, who have had a fixed affairs that fly to the United States all over the world.

The changes that apply to shipments of mainland China and Hong Kong, came into force on Friday at 12:01 pm. They will probably sow pain and confusion for consumers, as well as Small retailers.

Temu recently started Not about “import costs” On the site, while the Shein Shoppers website says that the rates ‘are included in the price you pay’.

Gabriel Wildau, a China analyst at Teneo, a consultancy, said that the change would “get a bite from Chinese export” and “online retailers whose most important sales argument is, cheap prices to increase their prices dramatically.”

“It is a price shock for price -sensitive American consumers who really enjoyed access to cheap goods,” he said.

The Trump government has also promised to eliminate the Maas in the countries from other countries, but said it was waiting for the government to find out how to deal with collecting costs of such packages. American customs officers are already burdened by the increased enforcement of the Trump immigration rules and the enormous expansion of global rates.

At the beginning of February, the administration briefly disabled the minimis -except for China, before he realized that the sudden change was overwhelming shipping channels, including the postal service. Mr. Trump then turned that order to set up his advisers more time to set up systems that could accommodate the change.

The minimis -Extraition was made in the 1930s to alleviate the work of customs officers who were obliged to collect rates in cases where the income would be lower than the costs for collecting the tasks. The congress increased the threshold for the minimis packages to $ 5 in 1978 and $ 200 in 1993, and then to $ 800 in 2016.

In recent years, the pressure to eliminate the Maas has grown in the law. Legislators are considering reforming the minimis rule and the Biden administration Proposed changes Last year that would limit the exception when it came to China.

A potential problem with the current rules is that they seem to create a discrepancy with which goods can be subjected by the post office at lower rates than goods that are moved using private carriers.

Goederen die vanuit China binnen de Verenigde Staten komen via particuliere vervoerders zoals DHL of FedEx, worden onderworpen aan tarieven van ten minste 145 procent-bijvoorbeeld om $ 14,50 aan taken toe te voegen aan een T-shirt van $ 10. Maar verzendingen die via de postdienst binnenkomen, worden geconfronteerd met een tarief van 120 procent van de waarde van de goederen of een vergoeding van $ 100 per pakket, dat in juni stijgt tot $ 200.

Shipments that enter through private carriers also seem to have been subject to other tasks, such as the rates that Mr Trump has imposed on China in his first term, and the most beneficiary tasks established by the World Trade Organization. But shipments traveling through the postal service are not.

Moreover, the postal service seems to be getting less control for collecting rates on goods sent from China to other countries and then to the United States via foreign postal services.

For the time being, the United States still offer the minimis exception for countries other than China. But from Friday, goods in China are not allowed to be eligible for the minimis, even if they are routed by another country before they come to the United States. Private carriers such as UPS and FedEx are obliged to collect information about the origin of products, so that rates still have to be paid for a Chinese made good that, for example, canada are sent to the United States.

But the postal service is not legally obliged to collect information about where products come from, and also not foreign postal services. This can lead to an increase in regulations that try to bypass Chinese rates by using the post office.

Peter Eavis And Julie Creswell contributed reporting.