“You’re going to see some substantial announcement over the next couple of days,” the Treasury secretary said in an interview on Fox News.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday said the Trump administration will soon announce a broad package of agricultural tariff cuts.
“You’re going to see some substantial announcement over the next couple of days in terms of things we don’t grow here in the United States, coffee being one of them,” Bessent aid in an interview on Fox News. “Bananas, other fruits, things like that. So that will bring the prices down very quickly.”
President Donald Trump has imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil, the world’s largest coffee exporter, and lower but still significant tariffs on other suppliers like Vietnam and Colombia, sending coffee prices higher in the United States.
Trump, in an interview Tuesday evening on Fox News, told host Laura Ingraham that he planned to reduce tariffs on coffee in order to bring down prices.
“Coffee, we’re going to lower some tariffs. We’re going to have some coffee come in,” Trump said. “We’re going to take care of all of this stuff, very quickly, very easily.”
Tariff rebates: Bessent also said Wednesday that the administration is looking at providing a $2,000 tariff rebate for families making less than $100,000 but that no final decision has been made.
“There are a lot of options here,” Bessent said on Fox News. “The president’s talking about a $2,000 rebate, and that would be for families making less than, say, $100,000.”
Trump floated the idea of paying a $2,000 tariff “dividend” to many Americans in a post on Truth Social, although he noted it would not include “high-income people.”
Bessent, in another interview Sunday, suggested the dividend could take the form of “the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president’s agenda,” citing the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime, among other things, rather than direct payments.
However, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, in an interview Tuesday on Fox Business Network, clarified that actual rebates were on the table.
“With the record revenue that’s coming in through tariffs, as we lower corporate taxes, as we lower business taxation, as we lower personal income taxation, we’re able to now get more and more revenue through foreign imports to power the Treasury and to be able to give rebates to the American people,” Miller said.