From POLITICO Weekly Trade, By Oliver Ward with help from Ari Hawkins, August 31, 2026
| DRIVING THE DAY: |
TOY VS. TOOL: For many, ATVs and their enclosed cousin, the utility terrain vehicle, are backcountry toys, popping up in YouTube sidebars and social media algorithms in off-road races set against arresting desertscapes.
But the vehicles are also the workhorses of modern agriculture, with farmers and ranchers often using UTV cargo beds to haul tools, fertilizer and seeds across rugged terrain.
“They’re not just luxury items,” Todd Cranney, the executive director of Save America’s Working Vehicles, told Morning Trade, noting that the machines are ubiquitous on his family farm in southern Idaho.
Both the off-road hobbyist and agricultural producer face the same tariff on the vehicles under the Trump administration’s metals duties. And administration efforts to ease farmers’ tariff burden are overlooking these dual-use items, Cranney warns.
The details: President Donald Trump has already promised some tariff relief for U.S. ag producers. A June proclamation offered temporary metals tariff reductions for a slate of ag machinery, including ATVs. But UTVs remain subject to the full 25 percent rate, which the industry believes stems from a lack of understanding from officials about what machinery famers and ranchers use.
Without an exclusions process like the one stood up in Trump’s first term, industries and companies are struggling to convey to the administration which products also have agricultural functions and warrant tariff reductions.
The administration’s approach to offering tariff relief “is a little bit ad hoc,” said Cranney, whose coalition was launched the day after the president’s June 1 proclamation slashing tariffs on some farm equipment.
“There isn’t really a process at this point,” Cranney added, but he said he’d like to see that change. “We’d like to see an exemption when it comes to ATVs and UTVs, and we’d love to see a process for other issues as well.”
Sensitive times: The administration’s June decision to pare back the steel, aluminum and copper tariffs on a raft of farm equipment and other downstream products bucked the Trump 2.0 trend for the steel, aluminum and copper duties. Rather than an exclusion process, where industries and companies could petition the administration for relief, officials have taken an inclusion approach, expanding the tariffs to cover more downstream products.
The Commerce Department collected public comments on its latest proposed expansion of the tariffs last week — which would hit 14 additional products, ranging from tubas to fire extinguishers.
But even as the administration looks to expand the duties, domestic industry has been unnerved by officials offering double-digit tariff reductions to Canadian exports as part of negotiations earlier this month. It used the latest comment period to stress the effectiveness of the duties and caution against tariff reductions.
“The Section 232 steel tariffs are clearly working,” the American Iron and Steel Institute, which represents metals producers, wrote in its comment, referring to the metals tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. “But their effectiveness continues to be undermined by circumvention and transshipment, often through downstream steel products.”
“Extending coverage of the Section 232 steel tariffs to even more steel intensive derivative products, as proposed in this rule, will close the gap foreign producers are using to blatantly circumvent the tariffs,” the group added.
Canada warnings: Industry jitters over the Canada negotiations are also visible in a new video from the American Primary Aluminum Association’s public and advocacy arm Aluminum Now. The one-minute video credited Trump with saving the domestic aluminum sector.
Any exemptions for Mexico or Canada, the group argued in the video, will “destroy President Trump’s historic victories and tens of thousands of American jobs.”
