2025 Trade Policy Agenda

The Office of the United States Trade Representative has released President Donald Trump’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda, outlining a strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and reinforce national security through assertive trade measures.

“The United States faces unprecedented economic and national security challenges. President Trump has set out a plan to tackle those challenges in his American First Trade Policy Presidential Memorandum,” said Ambassador Jamieson Greer. “Today’s Trade Agenda lays out the thinking and vision that undergird that plan

The agenda emphasizes the necessity of a “Production Economy,” asserting that “Americans are more than just what they consume,” and that the nation should not merely “move money around.” It advocates for policies that “favor a Production Economy” to “Make America Great Again.”

Highlighting past achievements, the document states that the United States “saved the entire world, dispatching three rounds of adversaries by winning two world wars and defeating Communism,” and “put an American on the moon.” It attributes these accomplishments to the nation’s “tremendous industrial power fueled by innovation and blessed with abundant agricultural and energy resources.”

The agenda criticizes “globalist elites” for pursuing policies that have led to the decline of the middle class and compromised national security through “fragile international supply chains.” It claims that President Trump “alone recognized the role that trade policy has played in creating these challenges and how trade policy can fix them.”

Asserting that the President’s trade policy has “proven that a robust and realist trade policy can create jobs, promote innovation, strengthen the national defense, raise wages, support farmers, and foster the manufacturing renaissance,” the agenda calls for continued use of tariffs and tough trade enforcement to protect American interests. 

The document concludes by stating that ensuring trade policy favors a Production Economy will help the President “Make America Great Again.”

WTO Left Standing

While criticizing the World Trade Organization, it's worth noting that the document does not call for the US to abandon the institution.   "Thirty years later, the viability and durability of the WTO is increasingly in question," the report states, and reviews familiar grievances, beginning with the role assumed by China.

The report also criticizes out the WTO's  "development agenda," including special and differential treatment (SDT) carveouts,  an "activist" dispute settlement architecture, and the failure of plurilateral initiatives.

"Further, waiving intellectual property rights under the TRIPS Agreement for COVID19 vaccines, as well as the conclusion of a weak agreement on fisheries subsidies, show that rather than boldly tackling global challenges the WTO is prisoner to its lowest-common-denominator....

"[T]he WTO that the United States helped create is in key respects not the WTO we have today, and the WTO we have today does not further the objectives of the countries that founded it."

Congress requires the U.S. Trade Representative to submit the President’s Trade Policy Agenda and Annual Report by March 1 each year.

To read President Trump’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda, click here.