The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction.

And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!

Unfortunately, Americans chose to elect an administration which is either unwilling to learn why a federal bureaucracy has to move slowly sometimes, or who is actively leveraging that precedent to undo it.

It's like letting the idiots on here claiming you can build twitter in a weekend run our country.

Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".

This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize:

The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive.

Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.