Hassett, a WH adviser, calls for Fed economists to have discipline about the tariff study.

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, President Donald Trump's top economist said that Federal Reserve experts should be punished for research that came out last week showing that American businesses and consumers were paying for almost all of the additional tariffs that the White House put in place last year.

Kevin Hassett, head of the White House's National Economic Council, told CNBC that "the paper is an embarrassment." "This is the worst paper I've ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve." People who worked on this material should probably be punished.

Hassett's comments are the most recent attack on the Fed by the Trump administration. The Fed has always been apart from day-to-day politics. It also shows that the White House is still aware of worries about growing costs for food, housing, and significant purchases like automobiles and furnishings, as polls show that Americans are still unhappy with the economy.

The New York Fed's findings are comparable to those of other studies, such as one by economists at Harvard and the University of Chicago, another by the Kiel Institut, a German think tank, and a report by the impartial Congressional Budget Office last week.

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report that showed that U.S. firms and consumers are paying about 90% of the tariffs that Trump has put in place. The researchers determined that the average tax on imports went up from 2.6% at the start of the year to 13% at the conclusion of the year.

Importers in the U.S. pay the duties to the U.S. Treasury. The only way that foreign firms would have to pay the expenses, as the Trump administration has asserted they do, would be if they lowered the price they sold to importers to cover the levies.

The New York Fed study found that overseas exporters have only modestly cut their prices, which is far less than the tariffs have raised them. This means that U.S. importers are paying for the levies.

The White House has blasted economists before for saying that Americans are paying the tariffs or will soon do so. In August of last year, Goldman Sachs' chief economist said that Americans will pay a bigger and bigger percentage of the tariffs over time. In response, Trump told David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, to dismiss the economist.

Many analysts thought that total inflation would rise more due of the tariffs, but that hasn't happened as much as they thought it would. This is partly because Trump has postponed, cut, rolled back, or permitted exemptions to many of the charges. But the prices of numerous things, like furniture, appliances, and tools, have gone up since the duties were put in place.

Ford and General Motors, for example, have both indicated they had spent billions of dollars on tariffs. GM predicted last October that it would pay $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion in tariffs in 2025. Ford claimed it paid $800 million in the second quarter alone.

Since October, the government has gotten around $100 billion in tariff money, which is more than it got in the whole 2024 financial year.