The feeding frenzy is on. In the first quarter of 2025, 212 different entities registered as House lobbyists on tariffs, up from just 89 in the first three months of last year.
Executive branch lobbying is not disclosed, but is almost certainly seeing an even bigger boom.
As we previously reported, Apple CEO Tim Cook has already secured a temporary exemption from tariffs on iPhones, Macs, and other products worth billions of dollars. Trump himself confirmed he "helped Tim Cook recently" with the exemptions.
Other industries are already lining up to petition for their own exemptions. In the last five years, the Commerce Department received 425,000 company requests just for exclusions from Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs. It granted more than 200,000 of them. Expanding tariffs to almost every product creates an exponentially bigger breeding ground for cronyism and corruption.
This is why we have said that if tariffs are to be imposed, they should be at a uniform low rate without picking winners and losers.
