White House Report Just Caught China Laundering Tariffs Through Its Favorite Escape Routes

President Trump imposed steep tariffs on China to stop Beijing from gutting American factories.

For years, Beijing quietly rerouted its exports through friendly countries to dodge those tariffs anyway.

A new White House report just put a jaw-dropping price tag on China's tariff cheating scheme.

Panama, Mexico, and Colombia Top the White House's Laundering List

The White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy released a report Thursday called "The Great Transshipment Scam."

Peter Navarro's team put a real number on something conservatives have suspected for years.

China has been laundering its exports through more than 40 countries to slip past American tariffs.

The report's central estimate puts the value of illegally transshipped goods at roughly $75 billion a year.

That translates into $19 billion to $26 billion in stolen tariff revenue annually, money that should be funding American priorities instead of subsidizing Beijing's cheating.

Panama, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil made the White House's high-risk list, alongside more than three dozen other nations flagged as transit points.

"Every dollar lost to this Great Transshipment Scam is a dollar stolen from American workers, manufacturers, and taxpayers," Navarro said.

"We're gonna catch you," Navarro warned the countries running the scheme, adding enforcement is "gonna run into the billions" as his team scales it up.

This is not a new Chinese trick, either.

Back in 2019, Vietnamese customs officials busted a stockpile of Chinese aluminum worth $4.3 billion that had been relabeled and shipped through Vietnam specifically to dodge American tariffs.

China's exports of raw aluminum to the U.S. fell nearly half that year, right as Vietnamese shipments quietly picked up the slack.

Beijing has run this playbook before.

Recliner Motors and Fake Labels Show How the Scam Actually Works

Here is what the scam looks like on the ground, according to the report.

A recliner motor gets built in China, ships to Vietnam, gets bolted into a piece of furniture, and lands on American shelves stamped "Made in Vietnam" instead of "Made in China."

Multiply that trick across electrical equipment, integrated circuits, plastics, and motor components, and you start to see why the number hit $75 billion a year.

The report projects the scam is costing America around 450,000 jobs and up to $150 billion in lost annual economic output.

Every one of those jobs is a factory job that should have come home under Trump's tariffs and instead stayed lost to a Chinese shell game.

President Trump signed Executive Order 14411 in June to strengthen customs enforcement specifically to close these loopholes.

Customs and Border Protection is now rolling out an AI-powered detection system called Detective Border to catch relabeled Chinese goods before they hit American shelves.

Importers caught falsifying country-of-origin paperwork now face retroactive tariffs going back a full year, which should terrify every company that has been playing this game.

The timing is not an accident.

This report landed weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit Washington in September, and Trump just handed his negotiators a receipt.

Xi can smile for the cameras all he wants, but Navarro's office just put a dollar figure on his country's cheating.

This is the same Communist Party that flooded America with fentanyl precursors, stole intellectual property for decades, and now got caught laundering tariffs through Panama, Colombia, and Mexico like some kind of international shell game for cheaters.

Every dollar China moves through a warehouse in Panama or Vietnam is a dollar that did not go to rebuilding an American factory floor.

The next move belongs to CBP's new detection system, and if it works the way the White House says it will, a lot of shipping manifests from Hanoi to Norfolk are about to get a lot more honest.

Sources:

• Peter Navarro, "White House report details 'Great Transshipment Scam' costing tens of billions in tariff evasion," Just The News, August 13, 2026.
• White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, "White House report says China leads global tariff transshipment scam," Fox News, August 13, 2026.
• "Press Briefing: Peter Navarro Speaks to Reporters Outside the White House," Roll Call Factbase, August 13, 2026.
• "China Behind 'Great Transshipment Scam' Costing Billions of Dollars, White House Says," NTD, August 13, 2026.
• "Vietnam Seizes $4.3B in Falsely Labeled Chinese Aluminum," Bloomberg, October 29, 2019.