What is Trump afraid we will see about how the tariffs were formulated?

When the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative unveiled its now-infamous “Liberation Day” tariff formula in April 2025, economists quickly noticed that something was not right.

At first glance, the formula looked impressive. It had Greek symbols, academic citations, and all the trappings of serious economic analysis. But once economists began examining it, the sophistication quickly fell away. Key terms, they noticed, effectively cancel one another out, leaving little more than a calculation driven by bilateral trade deficits.

For one of us, an economist, that raised a simple question: How did this formula come to be? So he filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the records behind it. Then came more than a year of delays, missed deadlines, and back-and-forth with the U.S. Trade Representative.

When the agency finally responded, it said it had found 31 pages of responsive records. It would release none of them — not one email, calculation or even redacted paragraph. Rather, the office insisted that every page is protected because the records include communications between the agency and the White House Council of Economic Advisers about the reciprocal tariff calculations.

Whether those privileges ultimately apply is a question for the courts. But they do not answer the larger question. From an economist’s perspective, the response raises an obvious question: If the economic case for these tariffs was so strong, why is the government so determined to hide its work? And why wouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers, a body of academic experts, put its name on a document that it reportedly helped to prepare?

For the other of us, the FOIA response raised a different, but closely related, concern. For two years, the Liberty Justice Center has represented businesses challenging the administration’s tariff actions in federal court. From that vantage point, these 31 hidden pages do not look like an isolated records dispute — they look like another piece of a much larger pattern.

Again and again, the legal justification has changed, even as the tariff policy has not. It was first justified under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The administration argued that a statute intended for extraordinary national emergencies gave the president authority to impose sweeping tariffs around the world. When the courts rejected that theory, the White House cited Section 122, a temporary trade law that Congress had expressly limited to 150 days. When that authority was challenged — and then expired — the administration moved on to another statute.

Now it has turned to Section 301, using a sweeping forced-labor investigation involving dozens of countries to impose another broad tariff program. Different statutes, different legal theories and different public explanations always seem to lead back to remarkably similar tariffs.

The issue is no longer simply whether the administration chose the right tariff policy. It is whether the administration has been searching for new legal and economic justifications to preserve the same tariff policy after earlier justifications were rejected or expired. Viewed individually, each shift can perhaps be explained. Viewed together, they tell a very different story.

That question is now before the courts. But the denial of the Freedom of Information Act request raises the same concern from a different direction. Were law and the economics driving the policy? Or were the law and the economics being assembled to defend a policy that had already been chosen?

It also matters who was involved. The Council of Economic Advisers is supposed to provide the president with rigorous, objective economic analysis, and the U.S. Trade Representative’s response confirms that the council participated in discussions surrounding the tariff calculations.

If professional economists inside the council warned that the formula made little sense, the public deserves to know. If they endorsed it, the public deserves to know that, too. What should not happen is for the entire record to disappear behind a blanket claim of executive privilege.

The administration’s handling of one of its own academic sources only deepens the mystery. One of the main academic sources cited in support of the formula was a then-obscure working paper by economists Pau Pujolas and Jack Rossbach. Just days later, a link to the same paper appeared again in a speech by then-chairman Stephen Miran, defending the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

But one of the paper’s authors later said the administration had misused their research to support the opposite of what the paper actually found. As Pujolas explained, “there’s a huge gap between my study and what they’re doing.”

In other words, the administration cited academic research to support a tariff policy that one of the paper’s own authors publicly opposed. That episode shows that at least one of the administration’s academic citations was not merely debatable — it was publicly challenged by the scholars whose work was being cited.

The 31 withheld pages may reveal whether anyone inside the government recognized that problem before the formula was published, whether concerns were raised and ignored, or whether no one raised the alarm at all. And by withholding every page, the government has ensured that we cannot know.

Reasonable people disagree about tariffs, trade deficits, and industrial policy. But the executive branch owes the public an honest explanation for policies that affect hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce.

When the government asks courts to defer to its judgment, businesses to trust its reasoning, and the public to accept sweeping economic policies, it should be willing to show its work. What is this administration afraid we will see?

Phillip W. Magness is the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. Sara Albrecht is chairman and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, which represents businesses challenging the administration’s tariff actions.