To understand just how lopsided the process is, look at the tariffs imposed by the Commerce Department in March on Canadian newsprint paper. An American company, North Pacific Paper Company, complained to the Commerce Department that Canadian manufacturers were harming their business by selling newsprint at noncompetitively low prices. The reality is that the general shift to digital platforms is the main cause of declining demand for newsprint.

That case in now before the I.T.C. (which will render its decision today). Unfortunately, in making their decision about whether to uphold the tariffs to protect the 34 employees of North Pacific Paper, the commissioners are not allowed to consider the damage that this domestic trade remedy would wreak on the 600,000 people employed throughout the American publishing industry. The law forbids it. And that, simply put, is crazy.

The good news is that there’s an easy fix: Change the statutes so that commissioners are required to consider the effects of trade restrictions on downstream industries and consumers.

The bad news is that the same steel special interests that nudged the administration to impose these punishing steel tariffs on millions of American consumers are protecting the biased I.T.C. process. Trade commission data shows that over 52 percent of anti-dumping duty and countervailing-duty cases that have landed before the I.T.C. are steel related, and most resulted in a duty on imports — which means higher costs for American producers that need steel.

Today, steel executives have an iron grip on the White House thanks to the deep ties of the president’s advisers to the industry. Mr. Ross made his fortune buying and selling steel companies and was sitting on a steel company’s board until his confirmation as commerce secretary. Robert Lighthizer, a private lawyer who represented the steel industry for years, is now the United States trade representative. The upper levels of both the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the Commerce Department have predictably been populated by other individuals with close ties to Big Steel. And the trade adviser Peter Navarro’s 2012 documentary, “Death by China,” was funded by one of the top beneficiaries of these tariffs — the steel producer Nucor.

This cronyism explains how the steel industry is directly involved in deciding which companies do or don’t receive exemptions from the steel tariffs and why so few exemptions have been granted.

The bias of Trump administration personnel alone makes it unlikely we will soon reform our trade-remedy system to weigh the interest of downstream consumers before imposing trade sanctions. But such reform isn’t so far-fetched. The European Union and Australia have “national economic interest” requirements built into their trade remedy processes. They take different forms, but they are meant to limit the imposition of tariffs to protect one industry at the expense of everyone else.

Less known is the fact that at the time of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, the United States implemented a transitional safeguard measure allowing the president to provide import relief for any industry of concern as long as the provision of such relief was in the national economic interest of the United States. As a result — to the great benefit of the American people — trade restrictions were imposed only once during the nine years the provision was in place: President Barack Obama’s tire tariffs, which unsurprisingly proved to be an unmitigated failure.

Veronique de Rugy (@veroderugy) is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

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