The Trump administration’s exemption on tariffs for electronics may be short-lived. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the White House’s decision to exempt items like smartphones, computers, and other consumer electronics from steep tariffs earlier this month was only temporary. A new set of duties focused on semiconductors is expected within “a month or two,” he said. “All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they're going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored,” Lutnick said during an interview on ABC’s This Week . The goal, he added, is to encourage chip and flat panel production in the U.S. and reduce dependence on Asian manufacturing. The clarification follows a bulletin from U.S. Customs and Border Protection released late Friday bringing a temporary exemption for a range of key electronics from the reciprocal tariffs President Donald Trump announced earlier this month. However, Lutnick emphasized that those same items would soon be swept up under a more targeted policy aimed at “national security” industries like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. “We need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels — we need to have these things made in America,” Lutnick said. The price of bitcoin dropped roughly 1% on headlines reporting on Lutnick’s words, before recovering back to the $84,000 mark. The wider crypto market, measured by the CoinDesk 20 ( CD20 ) index, is down roughly 1.6% in the last 24-hour period.
