WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., asked the Trump administration to consider tariff exemptions for four Alabama companies in the wake of “Liberation Day” in April 2025, despite publicly expressing support for the president’s tariff agenda, according to an email obtained by the Wall Street Journal and depicted in a recent opinion piece by the paper’s editorial board.
On Tuesday, Britt affirmed her general support for President Donald Trump’s economic policy and defended her strategy of using her leverage as a senator to help carve out relief for Alabama companies. The Journal’s editorial board called it a “tariffs for thee, exemptions for me” approach.
Britt doesn’t see it that way.
“I certainly support President Trump with regards to actually getting us on a level playing field,” Britt told Alabama Daily News in an interview, responding to the Journal’s article. “In the interim, you have to make sure that you are going eyes wide open to what’s happening in our state and what’s happening across the country, and how we can make sure that people aren’t penalized for the components only being made somewhere else.”
In an opinion article from the Journal published Monday, the editorial board wrote that an email from the senator’s legislative director showed that Britt had asked the U.S. Trade Representative Office for tariff exclusions on “four pressing issues” involving TNT Fireworks, Novelis, Kronospan and Airbus, which all have an Alabama presence.
“Each fit within the mold of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. and ensuring we have sufficient cost-effective inputs to allow that,” the email dated April 15, 2025, reads. The Journal obtained the email through a Freedom of Information Act request to the USTR.
But Britt has publicly supported Trump’s tariffs, decrying the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in February that the president did not have authority to issue unilateral emergency tariffs.
“What the media won’t tell you is that President Trump’s tariffs work, and that’s why even the Biden Administration left them in place,” she wrote on social media at the time. “Today’s ruling was disappointing, but as @POTUS made clear, we are not going to return to the status quo of allowing American jobs and manufacturing to be sidelined in exchange for cheap junk from foreign adversaries.”
For TNT Fireworks, which is based in Florence, Britt asked the USTR in the email to exempt fireworks from the tariff policy since “there is no domestic firework manufacturer, and over 99% of firework products are produced in China.” At the time, the senator’s team added that fireworks were needed to celebrate the United States Semiquincentennial this year.
Though the Trump administration has not made a specific exemption for fireworks, tariffs on Chinese goods have dropped since the email was sent last year, Britt’s office said.
“When at one point tariff rates were going to be more than a 100%, she used public hearings with Cabinet Secretaries as well as private outreach to make sure Alabama companies had a voice,” Tommy Glasgow, president of TNT Fireworks, said in a statement.
In her request, Britt asked for relief for the aluminum products company, Novelis, which is building a new $5 billion plant in Bay Minette that is expected to support up to 1,000 jobs.
While in construction, the company is “supplementing its American production” with imports, according to the email to the USTR. Britt’s team characterized Novelis as “trying to do exactly what we want them to do” in terms of boosting American manufacturing, but she said the tariffs were threatening that goal.
Novelis told ADN it “has not received tariff relief” since Britt’s email, but the company confirmed the new Alabama plant is still progressing on schedule.
Britt also asked for an exemption on behalf of wood panel manufacturer Kronospan as it expands its plant in Oxford. The email stated that the company had to import “highly specialized equipment” to make the expansion in Alabama possible.
Britt’s office said that since her communication with the USTR, the Trump administration has provided “exemptions for raw materials where tariffs could cause a lack of domestic supply and for products that cannot be produced in sufficient quantities in the United States or obtained from other sources,” as part of a Section 301 action in July.
Lastly, the Alabama Republican asked for tariff relief for aerospace manufacturer Airbus. At the time of the April 2025 email, Airbus had “suspended indefinitely” work to open a third assembly line in Mobile as the current trade policy had “made the project financially unviable.”
A spokesperson for Airbus, Kelsey Young, told ADN that Airbus opened its third assembly line last October, and the company remains “committed to growing our U.S. industrial footprint.” Britt’s office said the administration removed tariffs on Airbus aircraft and parts last September.
In response to the WSJ piece, the senator’s office also pointed to Britt’s brief questioning of Trump administration officials during congressional hearings about the impact of tariffs in these specific Alabama instances.
As the Journal’s editorial board said in its post, tariff exemptions were previously made for Republicans under Trump’s first term, and Britt said she was simply doing something similar for her state this time around.
“I feel like that’s my absolute job,” Britt said. “We know in the last Trump administration that there were exceptions that were made that gave them a more wholesome view of what was happening, and then they were able to adjust accordingly. And I have been hopeful that that’s what they would do here.”