The United States Trade Representative (USTR), Ambassador Jamieson Greer, has submitted the 2025 National Trade Estimate (NTE) Report on Foreign Trade Barriers to President Trump and Congress.
The 397-page NTE Report, which can be found here, is an annual report detailing foreign trade barriers faced by US exporters and the USTR’s efforts to reduce those barriers.
According to Ambassador Greer, “No American President in modern history has recognised the wide-ranging and harmful foreign trade barriers American exporters face more than President Trump. Under his leadership, this administration is working diligently to address these unfair and non-reciprocal practices, helping restore fairness and put hardworking American businesses and workers first in the global market.”
The report includes chapters on all the countries with whom the US has a trading relationship, from Algeria to Vietnam, with, perhaps not surprisingly, most attention being devoted to China and the European Union.
The section dealing with the UK begins with the situation after Brexit and explains that the United States and the UK completed the transition of five existing US-European Union agreements to new US-UK agreements.
The NTE Report does not mention the ongoing trade talks between the UK and US but goes into detail on UK tariff policy and non-tariff barriers such as the Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). It also covers sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) barriers and highlights that “exports of processed foods and beverages to the UK have been constrained in part by local legislation pertaining to genetically modified (GM) food products”.
This is likely to be one of the problems affecting the current negotiations as is digital services taxation, which also features in the NTE Report.
