White House puts a $26B price on transshipment, and 40-plus countries in the frame

The White House released a report on Thursday titled "The Great Transshipment Scam" that puts lost tariff revenue from goods routed through third countries at $19 billion to $26 billion a year ^[1][2]. For anyone running an import book, the estimate matters less as a fiscal line than as a published rationale, because the same document names more than 40 jurisdictions as elevated transshipment risks ^[4].

The mechanism described is familiar to anyone who has priced a sourcing shift: a China-made product moves to a third country, gets relabeled, repackaged or lightly assembled, and enters the United States under the third country's origin ^[6]. The report's central estimate for the value of illegally transshipped goods is roughly $75 billion annually ^[3]. Set the revenue range against the goods value and the implied duty forgone is 25 to 35 percent of landed value ^[1] - a rate consistent with China-specific tariff stacks rather than baseline duties. The range is also wide: the top of the estimate sits 37 percent above the bottom ^[2], which is what an inferential exercise looks like when the underlying entries are, by construction, misdeclared.

The macro figures are softer still and doing more of the political work. The report estimates 450,000 displaced American jobs and a GDP drag of $113 billion to $150 billion a year ^[9][10]. That is 1.5 to 2.0 times the value of the goods in question ^[3], and between $251,000 and $333,000 of lost output per displaced job ^[4]. Numbers of that shape are arguments, not audits.

The enforcement track was already laid. According to the Crypto Briefing account of the report, the White House issued Executive Order 14411 in June 2026 to strengthen customs enforcement against transshipment fraud, and Thursday's document functions as the data justification for it ^[12][13]. US Customs and Border Protection has reported a sharp rise in post-release discrepancy cases ^[8], meaning paperwork problems found after goods have already cleared. The report dates the acceleration of the practice to the 2018 Section 301 tariffs ^[7].

Read the country list rather than the dollar figure. It is not confined to Southeast Asian assembly hubs: Panama, Mexico and Colombia lead it alongside China, with Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic also flagged ^[5]. Naming a treaty partner and three Latin American logistics corridors as risk jurisdictions is the part with operational consequence, because a risk designation is the input to a rate schedule or a documentation regime.

What to watch: whether the 40-plus list turns into duty coverage, tighter origin evidence at entry, or both; whether CBP moves from post-release discrepancy findings toward pre-entry origin verification, which would change working capital, not just compliance cost; and electrical equipment and plastics, the two sectors the report singles out as most affected ^[11]. The report itself flags that consumer prices in affected categories could rise as the arbitrage closes ^[15]. Also watch for collections data that can be checked against the $19 billion to $26 billion, since the estimate is currently the government's own and, in the material available here, reaches us through a single trade-press summary ^[0].