Trump’s tariff onslaught is coming faster than his team can carry out

The Trump administration is moving at warp speed to announce new tariffs. Implementing them is another story.

The president has peppered his first weeks in office with a litany of far-reaching trade actions, such as imposing tariffs on China, threatening duties on Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, and announcing duties for a handful of major industrial sectors. All those announcements are creating a bottleneck at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department, which are in charge of implementing the tariffs, according to people familiar with the dynamics, prompting a mad race among staff to implement the president’s orders on a greatly accelerated time frame.

So far, only the China tariffs are in place—largely because the administration viewed them as low-hanging fruit with little collateral damage on U.S. consumers, according to people with knowledge of policy discussions.

Trump has also threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico on March 4, as well as an additional 10% on China. On Thursday, the president reiterated the levies on America’s northern and southern neighbors would move forward.

After that, 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium are set for March 12. There are a number of actions set for April 2, from the completion of trade policy reviews ordered on Inauguration Day, to the unveiling of 25% tariffs on automobiles, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. That is also the planned date for the announcement of Trump’s levies on reciprocal trade, which will seek to equalize U.S. tariffs with the duties and nontariff barriers imposed by other nations.

Administration officials are privately indicating that the full reciprocal action will take longer than the April timeline to implement—up to six months or even more, according to people familiar with the discussions. While there will likely be a reciprocal announcement on April 2, that time frame is simply too short to fully analyze the tariffs and nontrade barriers of all those nations, the people said.

A White House official said a report will be released on April 2 that will “outline the equivalent tariff rate” for other nations and the “mechanics for how they would be implemented.” Details for some countries might be released before others, the official added, but declined to detail the action further. The official also declined to comment on the timeline for reciprocal tariffs, but said any talk of a bottleneck in implementing the trade agenda is “premature.”

The completion date of other pending actions, such as a tariff investigation into copper launched this week, is unclear. Likewise for Trump’s planned duties on lumber imports, which he has previewed for sometime in April, but hasn’t specified an exact date.

The growing list made some of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill, as well as corporate America, skeptical that his team will deliver on all those tariff threats—at least by their self-imposed deadlines.

“This is sort of like the pep rally; the game hasn’t started yet,” Sen. Thom Tillis, a member of the Finance Committee, said of the early tariff announcements. “The aperture is pretty broad here. I do think that over time, if history is a guide, it’s got to narrow a bit.”

Already, the administration has had to delay a major aspect of their trade agenda—closing the so-called “de minimis” loophole, which allows shipments under $800 into the country duty-free. Trump ordered that provision be stopped for China, Mexico and Canada, but had to reinstate it temporarily after millions of packages piled up at U.S. customs. It is unclear whether the administration will shut down the loophole once again.

Trump officials are quietly narrowing another trade action. Trump has spoken about his reciprocal trade action broadly affecting U.S. trading partners writ large, but the actual notice of action from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office is narrower, directing commenters to focus on G-20 nations and those with persistent trade deficits with the U.S., including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam and more.

Though USTR says the nations in its focus comprise 88% of trade with the U.S., the action wouldn’t equalize tariff rates with every trading partner.

Privately, some administration officials are indicating that the reciprocal trade action likely won’t result in huge tariff increases on most nations—partially because many of those nations have relatively low tariffs, and because trading partners will try to negotiate them downward.

More trade actions are still expected, adding to the implementation bottleneck. Those are likely to be slapped on specific industries, a list likely to expand in the run-up to April 2, according to people familiar with the matter. In addition to the tariffs already announced, the administration is considering duties on critical minerals and products that contain them, the people said.

The administration’s patchwork of tariffs comes in lieu of imposing across-the-board tariffs that Trump promised on the campaign trail. Once in office, administration members decided that combining reciprocal trade action with sectoral tariffs would be more legally defensible than a universal tariff order, said people with knowledge of discussions, and would incur less collateral damage on U.S. consumers and in the stock market while still covering major swaths of the economy with tariffs.

Sectoral duties might be announced on April 2, but they are likely to be imposed under the national-security authority in Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, such as the pending actions on steel, aluminum and copper. That law requires a notice and comment period, typically 30 days. The steel and aluminum tariffs are an exception because they will be imposed under an existing tariff investigation.

Trump this week appeared to signal that the tariffs on Mexican and Canadian products would be postponed until April 2, before walking the comments. Looking to get them scrapped altogether or at least further delayed, Canadian officials for now are focused on convincing the Trump administration that they have reinforced their border—one of Trump’s criteria for avoiding the tariffs.

Canada sent the country’s new “fentanyl czar” and cabinet ministers to meet with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, this week. Canada named the czar as part of an agreement earlier this month with Trump to increase its efforts to curb the amount of fentanyl crossing over from Canada to the U.S.

Canada has argued that the amount of fentanyl seized at the Canadian border is a fraction of what is found at the southern border.

Mexico has stepped up efforts against organized crime groups, which were recently designated by the Trump administration as foreign terrorist organizations. Authorities have arrested more than 700 people since early February, when President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to deploy 10,000 National Guard troops along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Sheinbaum said that she was planning to have a telephone conversation with Trump in the coming days to follow up on the agreements reached by both leaders early this month.

“We hope that we can make this call to close the agreement,” she said this week.

Write to Gavin Bade at gavin.bade@wsj.com