The Trump administration reached a trade deal with Taiwan on Thursday, with Taiwan agreeing to remove or reduce 99% of its tariff barriers, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative said.
The agreement comes as the U.S. remains reliant on Taiwan for its production of computer chips, the exporting of which contributed to a trade imbalance of nearly $127 billion during the first 11 months of 2025, according to the Census Bureau.
Most of Taiwan’s exports to the U.S. will be taxed at a 15% rate, the USTR’s office said. The 15% rate is the same as that levied on other U.S. trading partners in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Japan and South Korea.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended the signing of the reciprocal agreement, which occurred under the auspices of the American Institute in Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States. Taiwan’s Vice Premier Li-chiun Cheng and its government minister Jen-ni Yang also attended the signing.
computer chips, the exporting of which contributed to a trade imbalance of nearly $127 billion during the first 11 months of 2025, according to the Census Bureau.
Most of Taiwan’s exports to the U.S. will be taxed at a 15% rate, the USTR’s office said. The 15% rate is the same as that levied on other U.S. trading partners in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Japan and South Korea.
Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended the signing of the reciprocal agreement, which occurred under the auspices of the American Institute in Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States. Taiwan’s Vice Premier Li-chiun Cheng and its government minister Jen-ni Yang also attended the signing.
“President Trump’s leadership in the Asia-Pacific region continues to generate prosperous trade ties for the United States with important partners across Asia, while further advancing the economic and national security interests of the American people,” Greer said in a statement.
The Taiwanese government said in a statement that the tariff rate set in the agreement allows its companies to compete on a level field with Japan, South Korea and the European Union. It also said the agreement “eliminated” the disadvantage from a lack of a free trade agreement between Taiwan and the U.S.
The deal comes ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned visit to China in April and suggests a deepening economic relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan.
Taiwan is a self-ruled democracy that China claims as its own territory, to be annexed by force if necessary. Beijing prohibits all countries it has diplomatic relations with — including the U.S. — from having formal ties with Taipei.
Cheng said Taiwan hopes the agreement will make it a strategic partner with the U.S. “so as to jointly consolidate the democratic camp’s leading position in high technology.”
The agreement would make it easier for the U.S. to sell autos, pharmaceutical drugs and food products in Taiwan. But the critical component might be that Taiwanese companies would invest in the production of computer chips in the U.S., possibly helping to ease the trade imbalance.
Prominent Republicans and gun rights advocates helped elicit a White House turnabout this week after bristling over the administration’s characterization of Alex Pretti, the second person killed this month by a federal officer in Minneapolis, as responsible for his own death because he lawfully possessed a weapon.
The death produced no clear shifts in U.S. gun politics or policies, even as President Donald Trump shuffles the lieutenants in charge of his militarized immigration crackdown. But important voices in Trump’s coalition have called for a thorough investigation of Pretti’s death while also criticizing inconsistencies in some Republicans’ Second Amendment stances.
If the dynamic persists, it could give Republicans problems as Trump heads into a midterm election year with voters already growing skeptical of his overall immigration approach. The concern is acute enough that Trump’s top spokeswoman sought Monday to reassert his brand as a staunch gun rights supporter.
“The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens, absolutely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
Leavitt qualified that “when you are bearing arms and confronted by law enforcement, you are raising … the risk of force being used against you.”
That still marked a retreat from the administration’s previous messages about the shooting of Pretti. It came the same day the president dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, seemingly elevating him over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who had been in charge in Minneapolis.
Within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Bovino suggested Pretti “wanted to … massacre law enforcement,” and Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and acted “violently” toward officers.
“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort, went further on X, declaring Pretti “an assassin.”
Bystander videos contradicted each claim, instead showing Pretti holding a cellphone and helping a woman who had been pepper sprayed by a federal officer. Within seconds, Pretti was sprayed, too, and taken to the ground by multiple officers. No video disclosed thus far has shown him unholstering his concealed weapon -– which he had a Minnesota permit to carry. It appeared that one officer took Pretti’s gun and walked away with it just before shots began.
States will share $10 billion for rural health care next year in a program that aims to offset the Trump administration’s massive budget cuts to rural hospitals, federal officials announced Monday.
But while every state applied for money from the Rural Health Transformation Program, it won’t be distributed equally. And critics worry that the funding might be pulled back if a state’s policies don’t match up with the administration’s.
Officials said the average award for 2026 is $200 million, and the fund puts a total of $50 billion into rural health programs over five years. States propose how to spend their awards, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assigns project officers to support each state, said agency administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.
“This fund was crafted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed only six months ago now into law, in order to push states to be creative,” Oz said in a call with reporters Monday.
Under the program, half of the money is equally distributed to each state. The other half is allocated based on a formula developed by CMS that considered rural population size, the financial health of a state’s medical facilities and health outcomes for a state’s population.
The formula also ties $12 billion of the five-year funding to whether states are implementing health policies prioritized by the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. Examples include requiring nutrition education for health care providers, having schools participate in the Presidential Fitness Test or banning the use of SNAP benefits for so-called junk foods, Oz said.
Several Republican-led states — including Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — have already adopted rules banning the purchase of foods like candy and soda with SNAP benefits.
The money that the states get will be recalculated annually, Oz said, allowing the administration to “claw back” funds if, for example, state leaders don’t pass promised policies. Oz said the clawbacks are not punishments, but leverage governors can use to push policies by pointing to the potential loss of millions.
“I’ve already heard governors express that sentiment that this is not a threat, that this is actually an empowering element of the One Big Beautiful Bill,” he said.
Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association, said she’s heard from a number of Democratic-led states that refused to include such restrictions on SNAP benefits even though it could hurt their chance to get more money from the fund.
“It’s not where their state leadership is,” she said. Oz and other federal officials have touted the program as a 50% increase in Medicaid investments in rural health care. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who has been critical of many of the administration’s policies but voted for the budget bill that slashed Medicaid, pointed to the fund when recently questioned about how the cuts would hurt rural hospitals.
“That’s why we added a $50 billion rural hospital fund, to help any hospital that’s struggling,” Bacon said. “This money is meant to keep hospitals afloat.”
But experts say it won’t nearly offset the losses that struggling rural hospitals will face from the federal spending law’s $1.2 trillion cut from the federal budget over the next decade, primarily from Medicaid. Millions of people are also expected to lose Medicaid benefits.
Estimates suggest rural hospitals could lose around $137 billion over the next decade because of the budget measure. As many as 300 rural hospitals were at risk for closure because of the GOP’s spending package, according to an analysis by The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“When you put that up against the $50 billion for the Rural Health Transformation Fund, you know — that math does not add up,” Cochran-McClain said.
She also said there’s no guarantee that the funding will go to rural hospitals in need. For example, she noted, one state’s application included a proposal for healthier, locally sourced school lunch options in rural areas.
And even though innovation is a goal of the program, Cochran-McClain said it’s tough for rural hospitals to innovate when they were struggling to break even before Congress’ Medicaid cuts.
“We talk to rural providers every day that say, ‘I would really love to do x, y, z, but I’m concerned about, you know, meeting payroll at the end of the month,’” she said. “So when you’re in that kind of crisis mode, it is, I would argue, almost impossible to do true innovation.”
President Donald Trump‘s administration is expanding its travel ban to include five more countries and impose new limits on others.
This move Tuesday is part of ongoing efforts to tighten U.S. entry standards for travel and immigration. The decision follows the arrest of an Afghan national suspect in the shooting of two National Guard troops over Thanksgiving weekend.
The Republican administration announced it was expanding the list of countries whose citizens are banned from entering the U.S. to include Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria. The administration also fully restricted travel on people with Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents.
People who already have visas, are lawful permanent residents of the U.S. or have certain visa categories such as diplomats or athletes, or whose entry into the country is believed to serve the U.S. interest, are all exempt from the restrictions. The proclamation said the changes go into effect on Jan. 1.
Trump warned of what he described as an increasingly antisemetic Congress and said the “Jewish lobby” is weakened in the United States as he spoke Tuesday night at a White House Hannukah party.
Hundreds of guests packed the East Room, including some survivors of the Holocaust, a number of lawmakers, Republican donor Miriam Adelson, conservative commentator Mark Levin and conservative activist Laura Loomer.
Trump talked about his support of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas and the subsequent bombing of Iran nuclear sites. He said Jewish people have never had a supporter like him in the White House.
The Trump administration said in its announcement that many of the countries from which it was restricting travel had “widespread corruption, fraudulent or unreliable civil documents and criminal records” that made it difficult to vet their citizens for travel to the U.S.
It also said some countries had high rates of people overstaying their visas, refused to take back their citizens whom the U.S. wished to deport or had a “general lack of stability and government control,” which made vetting difficult. It also cited immigration enforcement, foreign policy and national security concerns for the move.
The Afghan man accused of shooting the two National Guard troops near the White House has pleaded not guilty to murder and assault charges. In the aftermath of that incident, the administration announced a flurry of immigration restrictions, including further restrictions on people from 19 initial countries who were already in the U.S.
The new restrictions on Palestinians come months after the administration imposed limits that make it nearly impossible for anyone holding a Palestinian Authority passport to receive travel documents to visit the U.S. for business, work, pleasure or educational purposes.
The announcement Tuesday goes further, banning people with Palestinian Authority passports from emigrating to the U.S.
In justifying its decision Tuesday, the administration said several “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American citizens.”
The administration also said the recent war in those areas had “likely resulted in compromised vetting and screening abilities.”
Countries that were newly placed on the list of banned or restricted countries said late Tuesday that they were evaluating the news. The government of the island nation of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea said it was treating the issue with the “utmost seriousness and urgency” and was reaching out to U.S. officials to clarify what the restrictions mean and address any problems.
Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the United States, Ronald Saunders, said the “matter is quite serious” and he’ll be seeking more information from U.S. officials regarding the new restrictions.
The Trump administration also upgraded restrictions on some countries — Laos and Sierra Leone — that previously were on the partially restricted list and in one case — Turkmenistan — said the country had improved enough to warrant easing some restrictions on travelers from that country. Everything else from the previous travel restrictions announced in June remains in place, the administration said.
