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........

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