Chicken Soup Coming Home to Roost

Commentary by William Alan Reinsch

Published March 9, 2026

A popular cliché in politics and life refers to chickens coming home to roost, meaning, to use another cliché, what goes around comes around. Our mistakes catch up with us. Currently, in the trade arena, it appears that it is chicken soup, rather than the chickens themselves, that is coming home to roost. Or rather, it is the cans of chicken soup that are roosting. You may remember then-Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross during the first Trump administration, waving a can of Campbell's Soup on television and saying the steel tariffs would raise prices only a few cents and nobody would care.

At the time, the steel tariffs were lower and more limited. Now they are at 50 percent and cover not only items normally considered steel (including knitting needles and crochet hooks, apparently a threat to national security) but also downstream "derivative" products that contain steel but enter the country classified as something else-cans containing soup, beer, or whipped cream are all good examples. In the past, the defining feature for tariff purposes was the essence of the product; the container was an afterthought. Now that has changed.

That has had two consequences that are complicating the administration's trade policy. The first is that it raises prices on a lot of products that no one anticipated being hit by steel tariffs, many of them parts and components that go into end products manufactured in the United States. The result has been that prices of derivatives have gone up because the 50 percent tariff is assessed on the portion of the item that is made of steel.

At 50 percent, the tariffs amount to more than a few pennies per item, and they are getting in the way of U.S. manufacturers' ability to make competitive products-the very people Trump claims to be trying to help with higher tariffs.

The second problem is one of compliance. It turns out that calculating the steel percentage of a product is more difficult than one might think, particularly for companies that never had to worry about that before. In addition, since it appears that a handful of countries will have a lower tariff applied to their steel, U.S. manufacturers must also know the origin of the steel in their cans or other parts because the tariff might be less than 50 percent. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently acknowledged he has been getting complaints from companies that they have had to hire extra people simply to do the compliance bookkeeping.

Just as there are two problems, the administration seems to be of two minds on what to do about them. Some, like Ambassador Greer, have focused on the compliance issue and suggested the tariffs will not be abandoned, but the administration may find ways to simplify compliance. In other words, he wants to tweak the process. That is unlikely to achieve much, but it allows him to avoid saying the application of the tariffs to derivative products was a mistake.

Others in the administration, anonymous for obvious reasons, have hinted that there may be changes coming in product coverage-that some of the derivative products might be exempted from the tariffs and that the list of covered products will not be expanded. Of course, every time someone hints at that, someone else in the administration responds with a denial and points out, accurately, that the only person in the government who could make that decision is Trump.

The bottom line, as usual, is that nobody knows what might happen, but the level of chatter is such that it seems likely that something will happen soon. So, stay tuned on that, although the Iran war seems to have put decisions on other issues on hold.

There is also a bigger lesson here, and it is the same lesson that the administration eventually learned last fall when it started exempting from tariffs products including coffee and bananas that are not grown in the United States. (Why it took them six months to figure that out remains a mystery.) The lesson is one I learned in the government in the process of regulating exports. If you mess with the market, there are always downstream unanticipated consequences. Manufacturers, importers, and retailers are infinitely creative and adept at finding ways to mitigate or avoid the results of government actions they don't like. The competent public official attempts to anticipate as many of those as possible and structure regulations to cover them. That did not happen with coffee and bananas until late in the day, and it is now not happening with steel, although hope remains for some relief.

All of that is to say that the chickens, or the chicken soup, inevitably come home to roost. The competent policy maker prepares for that, and tries to prevent bad outcomes from the beginning, in order to avoid having to come in with broom and dustpan to clean up the mess later.

William A. Reinsch is senior adviser and Scholl Chair emeritus with the Economics Program and Scholl Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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