Ground beef averaged $6.69 a pound last December and has climbed since. On August 21 the president announced on Truth Social that he had concluded a deal to substantially lower that price for working American families. He signed the formal proclamation on August 26. Beginning September 1, for ninety days, the United States will admit up to 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings with no out-of-quota tariff, in monthly tranches of 100,000, to be mixed with American beef and sold as ground beef.
Whether it works is a separate question, taken up below. The mechanism he chose is the thing.
He removed a tax on an import in order to lower the price Americans pay at the register. That is the entire action. It has one prerequisite, and the prerequisite is that Americans were paying the tax.
For three years the argument from this administration has run the other way. The tariff is paid by the exporting country. China pays, Mexico pays, Canada pays, the money comes into the Treasury from abroad and the American consumer is untouched. That claim has been made from podiums, in speeches, at rallies, and in dozens of posts.
If it were true, this proclamation would do nothing. Removing a charge that falls on Argentina or Brazil would put money in Argentina’s pocket or Brazil’s pocket, and the shelf price in Cleveland would sit exactly where it was. The only way this action reaches an American grocery bill is if the tariff was in that grocery bill to begin with.
This concession did not arrive in an interview, where it could be walked back the following morning. It arrived in a signed proclamation with a legal effective date, because the policy required it.
What is actually driving the price
The beef problem is real and it has almost nothing to do with trade policy.
The American cattle herd stood at 86.2 million head in January, the smallest since the 1950s. Beef cow inventory is down 8.6 percent since 2020. Drought across Texas and Kansas destroyed grazing land, wildfires took more pasture in the West, feed costs stayed high, and ranchers who liquidated herds during the dry years cannot rebuild them quickly, because a cow takes about two years to produce a market animal. On top of that, New World screwworm detections led to restrictions on cattle coming north from Mexico, which removed another supply channel.
That is a supply collapse with biological timelines attached. No trade instrument fixes it, and the administration knows this, which is why the proclamation describes the ninety days as space for the herd to rebuild.
So the tariff lever was not chosen because tariffs caused the problem. It was chosen because it was the only lever available that could move a price before November 3.
The unenforceable part
The announcement includes a commitment that the imported beef will sell at roughly 25 percent below current market prices.
A commitment from whom is not stated. The administration has not identified which country or countries will supply the 300,000 tons. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was still being asked days later and said details were being finalized. Economists have pointed to Brazil as the likeliest source, with Nicaragua supplying some, and one Texas A&M economist observed that the meatpacker JBS stands to do considerable business depending on how the order is read.
Argentina, which received a separate quota increase in February that quadrupled its duty-free allotment to 80,000 metric tons a year, appears to be excluded from this one.
There is no published enforcement mechanism for the 25 percent commitment, no named party bound by it, and no stated consequence if the discount fails to appear on a shelf. Importers buy at a price and sell at a price. A tariff waiver lowers the first one. Whether it lowers the second is a decision made by companies, and the proclamation contains nothing that requires them to pass it along.
The people it was supposed to help object
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents the ranchers the policy claims to be protecting, came out against it. Their objection was that flooding the market with below-market beef is not how you rebuild an American herd.
They have a point, and it is the ordinary tension in every trade decision. Cheaper imports help the person buying dinner and hurt the person raising the animal. Choosing the consumer over the producer is a defensible call and presidents make it regularly.
It is also the precise inverse of the argument for the tariffs in the first place, which was that they protect American producers at no cost to American consumers. Ninety days before an election, with affordability the top concern in the country, the administration has chosen the consumer and accepted the producer’s loss, and in doing so has demonstrated that the two were always in tension.
The size of it, honestly
The United States imported 562,000 metric tons of beef in the first quarter of this year, up 18 percent from a year earlier and 122 percent from five years ago. Adding 300,000 tons of trimmings over ninety days is a substantial increase in volume, not a token one, and it may well move the price of a pound of ground chuck.
That would be a good outcome. Cheaper hamburger in a year when hamburger is a genuine household problem is worth having, and anyone who wants the policy to fail for political reasons should examine that impulse.
The program expires ninety days from September 1, which falls in the final days of November. The election is November 3.
What this settles
Thirty-seven percent of Americans name prices and inflation the single most important problem facing the country, a figure that has not moved in three months. It is the most stable number in American public opinion, and it is the reason this proclamation exists.
The tariff argument has been unusually hard to settle in public, because both sides cite economists and most people reasonably tune it out. This ends it without an economist.
A president who believed foreign countries pay tariffs would not remove a tariff to make an American grocery item cheaper. The action makes no sense under that theory. It makes complete sense under the other one, which is that a tariff is a tax collected at an American port, paid by an American importer, and passed to an American buyer.
He signed it. It takes effect September 1.
Well, hell. He won the last election because the price of eggs had skyrocketed. The beef ploy is the same idea. I sure hope the voters can see through this in Nov. The idea of uninspected trimmings being mixed into US inspected beef makes me slightly ill and less likely to buy beef at any price. "remember the diarrhea lettuce!" should be our rallying cry in Nov.
Who wants American beef? The most disgusting meat on earth. Rained with antibiotics. Give them to your people first.