Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
President Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, February 21, 2025.
While the Trump administration promotes a massive tax cut for billionaires at the expense of programs like Medicaid and food stamps, President Trump is also doing the bidding of big business behind the scenes, in this case Big Tech. And as Trump undermines America’s national security through his alliance with Vladimir Putin, he is also trying to sabotage the security of our data.
Exhibit A is an odd White House order released last Friday with the convoluted title “Defending American Companies and Innovators From Overseas Extortion and Unfair Fines and Penalties.” The order is directed to cabinet departments and the U.S. Trade Representative, and plainly carries water for Big Tech.
The order requests these departments to investigate foreign taxes, consumer protections, and data privacy rules that supposedly discriminate against U.S. companies, and it sets in motion the possibility of tariffs and other forms of retaliation.
Is this nuts? Let us count the ways.
For starters, this order is at odds with U.S. law. In March 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that forbids data brokers from moving certain types of Americans’ sensitive personal information offshore so as to protect American national security and individual privacy. This bill was later included in a national security and foreign aid package, which was passed by both chambers of Congress and signed into law on April 24, 2024.
The order also is an affront to the privacy and security protections of 162 countries that have also passed national personal data protection laws. The premise of the White House directive, that these laws somehow “discriminate” against U.S. companies, is also preposterous. The biggest tech companies happen to be American, but the laws apply to all.
A further mixing of apples and oranges in Trump’s directive is its threat to retaliate against digital taxation. This has nothing to do with the privacy and security issues. The only thing the two items have in common is that both goals are part of Big Tech’s wish list.
The Trump order reads like it was written or dictated by the tech lobby, and it probably was. Thus do Apple, Google, Meta, and the other tech supplicants to Trump hope for returns on their investments.
For chapter and verse on all that’s screwed up about this policy directive, see the new report “The Digital Trade Data Heist,” just out from the American Economic Liberties Project’s Rethink Trade. As Rethink Trade’s director Lori Wallach puts it, “This is the corporate Big Tech digital trade agenda. Only, in this instance Trump’s memo threatened tariffs against any country that tries to regulate American tech companies.”
This is also, characteristically, nuts because you can only use tariffs as retaliation so many different ways. Trump has already brandished tariff increases on steel and aluminum, general tariffs against China and the EU, and raised the possibility of universal tariffs as a revenue-raiser. How do you layer a retaliatory tech tariff on top of that?
The combination of bluster, incoherence, and contradictory goals is pure Trump. And remember, Trump is supposedly getting into bed with Putin the better to contain China. Limiting data security is a pure gift to China.
