Analysis
December 19, 2025
AISI Op-Ed: Policy wins that strengthened American steel in 2025
Written by Kevin Dempsey
For decades, the American steel industry has demonstrated its resilience, productivity, and commitment to innovation. But resilience alone is not enough when global steel overcapacity, unfair foreign trade practices, and regulatory overreach distort markets and threaten domestic manufacturing. In 2025, policymakers took meaningful steps to recognize that reality—and to act decisively in support of American steel.
Through coordinated action on trade enforcement, regulatory reform, and tax policy, the United States reinforced a simple but essential principle: a strong domestic steel industry is vital to our economic security, national defense, and energy future. Here are some of the key American steel policy wins for 2025:
Trade policy that addresses unfairness
Perhaps the most consequential achievement in 2025 was President Trump’s action to strengthen Section 232 steel tariffs by raising them to 50% and eliminating country and product exclusions. This step restored the original intent of Section 232 in order to counteract the persistent harm caused by global steel overcapacity and unfair trade practices. For years, exemptions and carveouts undermined the program’s effectiveness, allowing foreign producers―often backed by heavy government subsidies—to circumvent U.S. trade laws. By closing those loopholes, policymakers sent a clear message: trade enforcement must be firm, predictable, and fair.
While early data already show declining steel import volumes and market share, international trade conditions remain challenging. The OECD Steel Outlook 2025 shows an accelerating trend in global steelmaking capacity, which will outpace steel demand and lead to an increase in global steel excess capacity to a level of 721 million metric tons (mt) by 2027, due primarily to the trade-distorting policies and predatory practices by China and other countries.
From 2000 through 2024, annual Chinese raw steel production increased by roughly 880 million mt—a volume more than 10 times greater than the total crude steel production in the United States in 2024. If left unaddressed, this overcapacity could lead to new surges of harmful imports into the US market, which would undermine the health of the American steel industry. AISI advocates for maintaining the Section 232 steel tariffs and ensuring that the program achieves the objectives established in the 2018 Section 232 report, namely that the domestic steel industry operates at or above 80% capacity utilization.
Environmental regulation that restores common sense
Environmental progress and industrial competitiveness are not mutually exclusive. In 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took significant steps toward more balanced, data-driven regulation, particularly regarding air emissions rules affecting steelmakers.
Through sustained engagement, AISI has worked to focus EPA’s attention on needed revisions to a number of important air regulations that will result in meaningful improvements to the environment, yet do so through requirements that better reflect operational realities and do not impose an inordinate burden on the industry. These include changes to an Integrated Iron and Steel rule, a Taconite Ore Processing rule, and a Coke Ovens regulation. Revision to air emission limits for new electric-arc furnaces is also underway, as is overall improvement and streamlining of the permitting process.
These reforms preserve environmental stewardship while avoiding unnecessary constraints on manufacturing innovation. The result is a regulatory framework that encourages cleaner production without sacrificing domestic competitiveness or jobs.
Tax policy that incentivizes investment
This year also delivered meaningful progress on tax policy with the passage of the budget and tax reform bill supported by AISI and the broader manufacturing community. The legislation restored 100% bonus depreciation, reinstated immediate expensing of domestic R&D, and preserved the 21% corporate tax rate—all critical tools for capital-intensive industries like steel.
Steelmaking requires long-term investment in advanced equipment, workforce training, and lower-emissions technologies. By improving cash flow and reducing after-tax investment costs, Congress strengthened the business case for continued modernization of American steel facilities and helped ensure that innovation happens here, not overseas.
Policies that preserve the stainless raw materials market
Finally, 2025 underscored the importance of advocacy beyond carbon steel. AISI’s work on nickel markets—critical to stainless steel producers— successfully helped elevate concerns about foreign subsidies, market concentration and cross-border trade distortions, particularly involving Indonesia and global acquisitions affecting nickel supply. AISI advocacy helped facilitate international investigations into a mining company’s sale of its nickel mining operations in Brazil to an entity controlled by a Chinese state-owned enterprise. A resilient stainless sector strengthens US manufacturing, infrastructure, and energy systems alike.
The work is not finished. In 2025, the United States took decisive steps to put its steel industry on firmer footing. That is good news not only for the people who work in our industry and the steel communities, but for the nation. Still, the policy successes of 2025 did not happen by accident. They reflect a growing bipartisan understanding that manufacturing matters—and that steel, quite literally, forms the backbone of the American economy. With the right policies in place, American steelmakers will continue to invest, modernize, and lead the world in productivity and innovation in 2026 and beyond.
Editor’s note
SMU welcomes opinions from across the steel industry. We’re happy to share the thoughts above from Kevin Dempsey, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI). If you have an opinion you’d like to express to the broader steel community, please contact us at info@steelmarketupdate.com.
