Politicizing AD/CVD in Both Directions
We don't get much reporting on the behind the scenes details of AD/CVD calculations, but Politico had an article recently about how U.S. Commerce Department officials were trying to keep these duties down (yes, down – that's not a typo!):
A monthslong crackdown within the Trump administration to soften its trade rules all started with a flap over pasta.
In the aftermath, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other top Commerce Department officials are leaning on agency staff not to drive up tariffs on grocery items and other goods ahead of the midterm elections.
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Agency leaders first stepped in late last year, after a Commerce Department investigation determined in September that leading Italian pasta makers had been underpricing the products they sold in the U.S., in violation of trade rules. The proposed punishment — sky-high tariffs on the pantry staple — drew headlines at a time when the administration was trying to convince Americans its trade agenda was not driving up prices.
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In particular, he and other top Commerce officials have discouraged staff from pursuing the most aggressive possible tariffs in the pasta case and other similar investigations into trade violations, according to four people familiar with the matter, granted anonymity to share unreported details about the internal discussions.
In some cases, senior officials instructed staff to recalculate rates that were deemed too high, two of the people said. The result has been much lower duties on violators in recent months compared to the past.
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Lutnick signaled to staff across meetings and private correspondence in the fall of 2025 that the administration would no longer prioritize the most aggressive forms of enforcement, according to the four people. In a meeting in March, senior Commerce officials told private-sector lawyers about the new approach, stressing that the administration would no longer back the most aggressive form of enforcement, two of the people said.
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Since the fall, Commerce officials overseeing antidumping and countervailing investigations have selected the lowest tariff option under consideration in the overwhelming majority of cases, two of the people familiar said. One of the people said that career staff initially chose the highest rate 90 percent of the time, but senior leadership would “ask to redraw the numbers” if all the options seemed too high.
I'm not totally sure how this story made its way into the press, although I can imagine that domestic industry lawyers were getting annoyed at the Commerce Department and perhaps looked for ways to make their concerns public.
Thinking about the big picture here, one possible takeaway from recent U.S. trade policy developments is that the unrestrained use of tariffs other than AD/CVDs has brought a bit of restraint to AD/CVDs. But I'd want to hear from practitioners about this before reaching any firm conclusions on the connection.
The last time I remember mainstream media reporting on the inner workings of AD/CVD calculations was a 2003 Washington Post article, which was about Commerce pushing duties in the direction people would generally expect:
... Lawyers who defend foreign companies in dumping cases complain that [Joseph] Spetrini stands out for his tendency to use his discretion in ways that hurt their clients, the result often being higher "dumping margins" set by the department on imported goods, with concomitantly higher duties.
"Bending the rules in favor of petitioners – that's what he views as his job, frankly," said one trade lawyer, speaking of the U.S. parties in dumping cases.
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... [Spetrini] has considerable latitude in interpreting the rules and deftly skews the outcome toward high margins, according to a number of former employees who relate similar accounts of how he operates. A term several used to describe Spetrini's approach is "margin shopping," or looking at different ways to calculate an importer's costs or prices and choosing the one that helps fatten the prospective margin to a desirably high level.