President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to begin an investigation into whether foreign production of copper and imports of the material into the United States pose risks to America’s economic and national security.
White House officials said that, depending on the results of the inquiry, new tariffs could be applied on copper, which is widely used in manufacturing and construction and is crucial to the U.S. military and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
White House officials were scant on details during a call with reporters Tuesday about when the inquiry might conclude or what rate tariffs might be set at, saying they did not want to prejudge the results of the investigation.
Peter Navarro, a senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said that Mr. Lutnick would move “in Trump time, which is as quickly as possible, and get the results of his investigation to the president’s desk for possible action.”
The potential tariffs would help to protect the domestic copper industry that the White House says has been undermined by unfair trade practices by other countries and is struggling to compete. Copper is, among other things, an essential component in the building of ships, aircrafts and tanks.
The Trump administration framed it on Tuesday as an issue of national defense as much as an economic one, saying that the metals would be needed for the military, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, and that geopolitical turmoil could sever the United States from needed supplies.
“Tariffs can help build back our American copper industry, if necessary, and strengthen our national defense,” Mr. Lutnick said. “American industries depend on copper, and it should be made in America — no exemptions, no exceptions.”
“It’s time for copper to come home,” he added.
Like the tariffs on steel and aluminum that President Trump is promising to reinstate next month, copper tariffs would raise costs for a variety of other industries that depend on the metal and could generate pushback from them. That includes makers of automobiles, electronics and telecommunications equipment, as well as construction companies, which use copper for plumbing, roof construction and other uses.
The tariffs could also spur new fights with countries that ship metal to the United States. America’s largest foreign source of copper is Chile, which sends the equivalent of $4.63 billion of the metal to the United States each year, followed more distantly by Canada, Peru, Mexico and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
U.S. copper production has been falling over time. The country mined an estimated 1.1 million metric tons of copper in 2024, down roughly 20 percent in a decade, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
China is also a major global producer of copper but sends relatively little to the United States because of previously imposed tariffs. But White House officials say that Chinese copper production has still driven down global prices and that China has been snapping up copper resources globally.
Mr. Navarro said in the call with reporters Tuesday that China had “long used industrial overcapacity and dumping as an economic weapon to dominate global markets” and systematically undercut competitors from other countries.
“It is now using that same model to gain control of the world’s copper markets,” he said.
Copper prices have climbed this year, ahead of expected tariffs and continued resilience in manufacturing activity, according to a note earlier this month from analysts at Citigroup. The United States consumed about $17 billion of copper in 2024, and imported about 45 percent of that amount, the analysts said.
Asked how the president had chosen to take up the issue of copper, a Trump administration official on the call said that Mr. Trump has the ability to foresee far into the future what others might miss. The official made a reference to a 1988 interview in which Mr. Trump talked to Oprah Winfrey about trade with Japan, and said that exchange presaged how the president would think about retaliation against foreign governments that were “cheating” the United States.
Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on a variety of imports, including steel, aluminum, automobiles and pharmaceuticals. He also came within hours earlier this month of imposing tariffs on Canadian and Mexican exports, saying the countries were not doing enough to stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States. He paused those tariffs for a month, but said this week they would go into effect March 4 as planned.
Mr. Trump also imposed an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China, which brought retaliatory tariffs from the Chinese on American exports. And he has introduced a plan to dramatically reform U.S. tariff rates on other countries, by changing them to reciprocate the tariff levels that other countries charge the United States, as well as capturing certain trade behaviors he deems unfair.
The copper investigation will be carried out under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the president to impose tariffs on foreign products in the interest of national security. By law, the commerce secretary has 270 days to present findings from the investigation to the president.
A White House official said the investigation would include raw mined copper, refined copper, alloys, scrap and certain derivative products that are made with copper.
Rebecca F. Elliott contributed reporting.
