The Fabricated Tariff Chart: White House Data That Didn't Add Up

Economists — including several affiliated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) — quickly reverse-engineered the chart and found its "tariff rates" weren't measurements of foreign tariffs at all. ^[3]

The formula behind every number on the chart was simply a country's 2024 U.S. goods trade deficit divided by the value of U.S. goods imports from that country, with a 10% floor — an equation with no term for the tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or currency practices the chart claimed to capture. ^[3]

PIIE's Robert Z. Lawrence put it bluntly: by "using balanced bilateral trade as the standard for reciprocity... the [Council of Economic Advisers] and Trump are both misleading the public." ^[3]

The World Trade Organization publishes tariff profiles for more than 170 economies, built from countries' actual bound and applied tariff schedules rather than trade-balance arithmetic. ^[4]

Real average tariffs are far below most of the chart's numbers — even by the administration's own cited figures. The executive order itself put the U.S.'s simple average MFN tariff at 3.3%, versus 11.2% for Brazil and 7.5% for China — nowhere near the chart's headline rates for those and dozens of other countries. ^[2]

Trade deficits are driven by macroeconomic factors — savings and investment balances, currency dynamics, energy needs — that have little to do with tariff levels, economists at the Brookings Institution have argued, saying the administration conflated the two. ^[5]

The U.S. ran a $27.3 billion goods trade deficit with Canada in 2025 even though most U.S. exports enter Canada duty-free under the USMCA; the gap is driven almost entirely by U.S. Midwest refineries' need for Canadian crude oil, not tariffs. ^[6]

Trade economists across the political spectrum rejected the chart's methodology. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) called the underlying formula "rough justice at best, blunt force at worst," noting it punished high-deficit countries like Vietnam and Cambodia regardless of their actual trade barriers. ^[7]

Tax Foundation economist Erica York called it "a fundamentally nonsensical way to calculate 'reciprocal' tariffs," adding that the factors the White House said it was measuring "are invented numbers that have zero relationship to real policies." ^[1]

When pressed on the methodology, USTR published a document, "Reciprocal Tariff Calculations," defending the numbers as reflecting tariffs plus non-tariff barriers such as currency manipulation. ^[8]

But economists who examined the published formula found it mathematically equivalent to the same trade-deficit-divided-by-imports calculation, with no term actually representing a foreign tariff rate. ^[3]

USTR's own National Trade Estimate Report — its annual, publicly posted accounting of specific foreign trade barriers by country — lists concrete measures like agricultural restrictions and digital-trade rules, not a single percentage per country, and doesn't correspond to any of the chart's numbers. ^[9]