As school districts, parents, and students nationwide prepare for fall, music educators are wrangling with a sour note. On August 6, 2026, the US Commerce Department issued a request for comment this month on a proposal to impose tariffs on imported brass wind instruments such as trombones, trumpets, and tubas as a threat to national security. These instruments were part of a list of derivative products covered by Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows tariffs to protect industries vital to security interest. If implemented, this inclusion would harm music retailers and school music programs while opening the door to considering virtually any imported good as such a threat.
The proposal and rationale
The argument for including brass wind instruments is straightforward: For the United States to build out critical mineral supply chains—both copper and zinc, which together form brass, are on the US critical minerals list—requires a consistent demand signal. Tariffing brass wind instruments would ostensibly create greater incentives to produce instruments domestically. But brass wind instruments account for a trivial share of US copper consumption, which is already soaring due to the artificial intelligence (AI) data center boom and attendant electrical grid expansion. Including brass horns under Section 232 might shift demand toward US producers, but only by a tiny fraction of a percent. Their inclusion or exclusion will not materially alter market fundamentals for copper. The effect on musical instruments and their consumers would be harmful.
The vast majority of student-grade musical instruments for sale in the United States are imported. In a textbook example of globalization, firms take advantage of global production networks to the benefit of consumers and music lovers. Student-grade instruments are mostly manufactured in China and Southeast Asia, whereas master-crafted horns made in the United States can be sold at much higher prices. The US manufacturing base can therefore service the high-end (and higher-margin) market while lower-cost imports provide more bang for the buck for school music programs and cost-sensitive beginner musicians. US musicians typically start on cheaper imported instruments before moving to US-made instruments as their skills progress and pockets deepen. As I've argued before, low-cost imported instruments are the seed corn of the US musical instrument industry's future consumer base.
Previous Trump administration tariffs, including those imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), have already done considerable damage. In the first quarter of 2026, real imports of wind instruments were down 23.2 percent from the first three months of 2024, effectively turning the average student brass quartet into a trio. Effective tariff rates for wind instruments tripled between Q1 2024 and Q1 2026, from 5 percent to 17.3 percent. Moreover, existing Section 232 tariffs on semi-finished copper materials—raw copper ore and concentrates are exempted from tariffs, as they feed US-based smelters—have actually harmed US instrument makers.
For example, Conn Selmer, a world-class horn maker based in Elkhart, Indiana, recently closed its facilities in Eastlake, Ohio, offshoring production to China.1 Ironically, Conn Selmer is owned by John Paulson, a major Trump donor and proponent of Trump's tariffs. The company's own account of the closure emphasizes chronic losses and an inability to match Asian competitors on cost. Whatever weight upstream metals tariffs carried (or didn't) in that calculation, they could not have helped operating margins at the facility. The Trump administration is now seeking to use the same 232 authority to reverse (or simply punish) offshoring decisions made under a tariff regime that raised domestic input costs. Five weeks after Conn Selmer shuttered its Ohio facility, the administration proposed tariffs on the very product the company had just moved offshore.
The immediate harm of these tariffs, if implemented, would be straightforward: Fewer school districts would be able to stock beginner instruments and fewer students would have access to music education. Beyond the direct budget impact, the US musical instrument industry benefits from a robust domestic culture of musical training and engagement that drives nearly half of the global market for musical instruments.2 American musicians, orchestras, and music education shape global cultural perceptions and generate substantial services exports in the forms of concert tours, recordings, and streaming. This phenomenon depends on a robust pipeline of beginner musicians who learned on affordable instruments. Tariffs that price students out of music wouldn't just hurt this year's school budgets. They would thin the talent pool and erode cultural capital that took generations to build.
The precedent
In its request for public comment, the Commerce Department does not cite a documented case of Americans or American interests being harmed by imported brass instruments, let alone any threat to national security posed by trombones. The argument hinges on import substitution toward domestically made horns that would contribute materially to aggregate demand for upstream US-processed copper, aluminum, and steel. This argument of course would apply to any finished good with substantial copper, aluminum, and steel content.
If the stated rationale—that tariffs on goods containing copper stimulate demand for domestically-processed copper—were genuine and consistently applied, commercial aircraft and aircraft engines would be obvious candidates for inclusion. They contain substantial quantities of both metals and dwarf brass instruments in scale and economic significance. Yet the administration declined to tariff aircraft, opting instead for negotiation, despite having been found to constitute real sources of vulnerability: Commerce investigated aircraft (May 2025), found they threatened national security (January 2026 findings), and the administration explicitly declined to tariff them (July 2026 proclamation).
The inconsistency is obvious: Either the administration is selectively applying its own stated rationale based on political considerations rather than economic logic, or the rationale itself is a pretext and was never the real driver of tariff policy.
Either way, tariffing brass instruments while leaving commercial aircraft untouched—despite Commerce having found foreign aircraft producers to threaten national security—would reveal the selection had been made on grounds having less to do with copper demand stimulation and more to do with political considerations. The administration had the option to tariff aircraft and declined. It proposes to tariff brass instruments instead, weeks after a major donor offshored production of those instruments to China.
Applying Section 232 tariffs to brass wind instruments would not appreciably move the needle in terms of stimulating demand for US copper (or steel or aluminum) production. It would raise costs on aspiring musicians, eroding the availability of musical education for American students and undermining a key source of US cultural capital and actual cultural exports. It would not materially improve US national security. And it would make abundantly clear that Section 232 is, like many tariff authorities delegated to the executive, in need of congressional reform or court-mandated guardrails.
Notes
1. Eastlake produced French horns, tubas, and sousaphones. Professional French horn production moved to Elkhart, Indiana; tubas, sousaphones, and student and intermediate French horns went offshore.
2. Per the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), the US music products industry accounts for $9 billion of a $19.5 billion global market.
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