White House adviser says NY Fed researchers should be punished for paper

Daniel de Visé, USA TODAY

Thu, February 19, 2026 at 3:29 AM GMT+9 2 min read

The White House is not pleased with a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that found Americans shoulder most of the costs of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The New York Fed study said American consumers and companies paid nearly 90% of the tab for Trump’s tariffs through late 2025.

Speaking to CNBC on Feb. 18, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett lambasted the Fed report.

“I mean, the paper is an embarrassment,” Hassett said. “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.”

Hassett went on to say that the paper’s authors should be “disciplined.” A New York Fed official declined comment on Hassett’s remarks.

President Donald Trump and his critics have sparred over the economic cost of tariffs to Americans.

Did tariffs help or hurt American consumers?

Trump, his administration and its critics have sparred over the economic toll of tariffs on American families.

On Feb. 6, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation reported that the 2025 tariffs were the largest U.S. tax increase since 1993, equating to a tax increase of $1,000 per household that year and another $1,300 in 2026.

The New York Fed analysis, published Feb. 12, found 94% of the import taxes fell on American companies and consumers through August 2025. By November, the pass-through rate dipped to 86%.

“In sum, U.S. firms and consumers continue to bear the bulk of the economic burden of the high tariffs imposed in 2025,” the researchers wrote.

The much-feared tariff inflation crisis never came

But tariffs haven’t moved the needle much on consumer prices. The annual inflation rate for January came in at a modest 2.4%.

Many observers warned tariffs would spark an inflation crisis: It never arrived.

“Prices have gone down,” Hassett told CNBC. “Inflation is down over time. Import prices dropped a lot in the first half of the year, that leveled off, and real wages were up $1,400 on average last year, which means that consumers were made better off by the tariffs.”

Even if Americans paid 90% of the cost of tariffs, as the New York Fed reported, it doesn’t appear that many of those costs reached consumers.

As exporters and importers absorbed the cost of Trump’s tariffs, their impact softened at every step. Some exporters trimmed prices. American companies found cheaper products from other countries or absorbed tariff costs themselves.

In the end, only about 20% of the tariffs were passed on to consumers, according to a November paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Story Continues  

Through late 2025, tariffs added about 0.7 percentage points to the U.S. inflation rate, according to the NBER report. In other words, without tariffs, the inflation rate for September might have dropped from 3% to 2.3%.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: White House adviser says NY Fed researchers should be ‘disciplined’

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