Tariff Transparency Bill Mandates Price Breakdowns on Goods Affected by New Presidential Duties

If you’ve ever bought something and wondered exactly how much of the price tag was thanks to trade policy, the Truth in Tariffs Act aims to give you an answer. This bill mandates that sellers in the U.S. must clearly display the portion of a product’s price that is specifically covering a “covered tariff.” Essentially, if a tariff is hiking up the cost of your new washing machine or power tool, the seller has to show you the exact dollar amount of that increase.

This new disclosure requirement kicks in just 30 days after the law is enacted. The bill strictly defines a “covered tariff” as any new or changed tariff rate that the President puts in place on or after January 20, 2025, for discretionary or emergency reasons. This means it’s targeting tariffs that are newly implemented or significantly altered by presidential action, rather than long-standing trade duties.

The Price Tag Breakdown: Who Pays and Who Tells?

For consumers, this is a win for price transparency. Say you’re buying a new imported car part for $300. If a recent presidential tariff added a 10% duty, the seller would have to show that $30 of that price is a direct tariff cost. This provides concrete, real-time data on how trade policy affects your wallet, making it harder for companies to hide markups under the general umbrella of “import costs.” The goal is clearly to empower consumers to know exactly what they’re paying for when buying goods subject to these duties.

Enforcement falls to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is tasked with writing the rules on how sellers must display this cost “clearly and obviously.” If a business fails to comply, the violation is treated exactly like an unfair or deceptive business practice under existing FTC law. This is a smart move; instead of creating a whole new regulatory structure, the bill leverages the FTC’s existing power to investigate and penalize businesses that mislead consumers.

The Small Business Exemption and Practical Challenges

Here’s where things get complicated: the bill explicitly exempts any business that qualifies as a “small business concern” under the Small Business Act. While this protects mom-and-pop shops from a potentially complex accounting headache, it creates an uneven playing field for consumers. If you buy a product from a large retailer, you get the tariff transparency; if you buy the exact same product from a small, local importer, you don’t. This creates a two-tiered system of consumer protection based solely on the size of the seller.

For large and medium-sized importers and retailers, compliance is going to be a major administrative lift. They will need new systems to track specific tariffs on specific products, calculate the embedded cost, and ensure that cost is displayed correctly at the point of sale—whether online or in a physical store. While the transparency is beneficial, the cost of implementing these tracking systems will ultimately be borne by the businesses, and potentially passed on to consumers in other ways. Furthermore, since the FTC has to define what “clearly and obviously” means, businesses will be waiting on those regulatory details before they can fully prepare their systems, adding a layer of uncertainty to the rollout.