During a dinner with a dozen major United States tech leaders last week, President Donald Trump confirmed again that his administration plans to impose “fairly substantial” tariffs of up to 100% on semiconductor imports.

There is widespread, bipartisan agreement that domestic chip production is critical for national security, economic resilience, and reviving America’s ability to manufacture high-tech products. With China threatening Taiwan and seeking to control global supply chains, tariffs should be welcome news for overall efforts to increase onshore semiconductor production.

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However, the Trump administration must be vigilant to prevent manufacturers from gaming the system. Recent comments from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggest companies could avoid the tariffs if they “commit” to building in America during Trump’s term. That standard risks granting a hall pass to companies that either do the bare minimum or make grand promises that never materialize, rendering the tariffs toothless.

Consider Apple, which has pledged hundreds of billions in domestic manufacturing investment to avoid tariffs. As I recently wrote, since 2017, Apple has effectively recycled and rebranded its commitments to three administrations while failing to deliver the manufacturing facilities they promised Trump during his first term. Without guardrails, the new semiconductor tariffs risk inviting Samsung, TSMC, and others to run the Apple playbook, where the headline is the only real deliverable.

While the administration’s carve-out makes sense on the surface — after all, tariffs are designed to incentivize manufacturers to relocate their operation to the U.S. to avoid a mark-up on their products — the Apple case and other recent history cautions that tougher, clearer standards should be in order. Absent clear production benchmarks and enforcement mechanisms, vague promises to “build here” will likely result in little more than overtures.

The previous administration’s CHIPS Act implementation offers a cautionary example. The spending bill provided billions of dollars in subsidies to foreign companies. While the funding ostensibly provided the start-up capital to build several fabs in the United States, construction of some facilities has been riddled with setbacks and promises of advanced chip making capabilities replaced by lesser alternatives.  

In many cases, this handshake agreement left U.S. manufacturing with second-generation technology, hardly the kind to help prop up America’s domestic competitiveness, at a significant cost to taxpayers.

Tech companies have shown they will take the politically expedient route to get their products into the market. Often, that involves behaving like politicians themselves: offer whatever it takes to get what they want, even if they have no intention of delivering.

One approach to stop this promise-now, hope-they-deliver-later dynamic would be a tariff package predicated on hard deliverables. A “chip for chip” framework would provide an exemption on foreign-produced products equal to the quantity produced here in the U.S., for example, it would offer a much more enforceable measure to ensure promises to manufacture in the U.S. materialize.

Domestic production would essentially be the entry fee to the world’s largest market, and chipmakers would therefore be incentivized to make their best wares here. This would not only make the U.S. less susceptible to China’s belligerence in the short term, it would also help build long-term high-tech industrial capacity, the kind that fled our shores thanks to decades of free-trade orthodoxy.

President Donald Trump’s stated objective is to induce “companies [to] bring their manufacturing and production back home, ultimately creating hundreds of thousands of new, good-paying jobs for Americans.” That won’t happen if companies can create a Potemkin village of American semiconductor production to otherwise perpetuate current business practices.

The Trump administration has a knack for negotiating deals based on reciprocity, from eliminating or reducing tariffs on American exports to getting NATO members to pay more for defense. As Secretary Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent formulate the details on the semiconductor tariffs, that same principle of reciprocity should guide their hands.

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Semiconductors power virtually every kind of modern electronics, from everyday appliances to national defense systems. As China and other countries race to produce world-leading technology, the imperative to secure America’s competitive advantage has never been more urgent.

President Donald Trump understands the power of tariffs. It is critical that he not rely on handshake deals to avoid them. A chip-for-chip tradeoff for any exemptions is one way to ensure that domestic manufacturing actually happens.

Evan Swarztrauber is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former policy adviser at the Federal Communications Commission.