The Trump administration’s tariff regime has been accused of royally screwing up all sorts of stuff—from small businesses to big businesses to America’s farms and the price of soup. Now, a new report claims that the president’s dingbat economic policy can claim another victim: America’s libraries.
404 Media reports that, since the elimination of the de minimis exemption—the policy that previously allowed imports worth less than $800 to go tariff-free—the flow of exchange for libraries that loan out books internationally has been all messed up. See, there are a large number of libraries, including many university libraries, that allow books to be exchanged with other academic institutions, including those in other countries. However, since Trump’s tariff nonsense began, some of those countries have stopped shipping materials to and from the U.S., stranding many of the books abroad, the report says.
404 interviewed several librarians who spoke about how the Trump administration’s tariff policy had begun to screw with the nation’s book-borrowing:
“The tariffs have impacted interlibrary loans in various ways for different libraries,” Heather Evans, a librarian at RMIT University in Australia…[said] in an email. “It has largely depended on their different procedures as to how much they have been affected. Some who use AusPost [Australia’s postal service] to post internationally have been more impacted and I’ve seen many libraries put a halt on borrowing to or from the US at all.”
Another librarian, Jessica Bower Relevo, associate director of resource sharing and reserves at Yale University Library, told the outlet that the practice of sharing books internationally is a longstanding practice that has been beneficial to academia:
“Interlibrary loans has been something that libraries have been able to do for a really long time, even back in the early 1900s,” Relevo said. “If we can’t do that anymore and we’re limiting what our users can access, because maybe they’re only limited to what we have in our collection, then ultimately could hinder academic progress.”
Gizmodo reached out to the White House for comment. We received an automated email explaining that response times might be impacted by the government shutdown. “As you await a response, please remember this could have been avoided if the Democrats voted for the clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government open,” the email states.
It’s not as if MAGA has ever been particularly kind to libraries or librarians. Over the past several years, many high-profile campaigns have been waged against public libraries, with rightwing activists targeting LGBTQ books and other supposedly “woke” materials, demanding that such tomes be cleansed from the shelves. Earlier this year, as part of the DOGE purges, the Trump administration also fired many federal library employees. Now, in addition to demonizing librarians and firing their staff, the Trump administration can also brag of having helped curb the internationalism of America’s library system—an act which is pretty on brand for them.
