The White House will not renew the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, effectively ending the country’s trilateral economic pact with its closest neighbors and allies.
“The United States did not agree to renew the USMCA in its current form,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement Wednesday, the deadline to renew the 16-year arrangement. Greer added that, despite the lapse, the USMCA would remain “in force pending resolution of these issues or until the Agreement’s termination.”
“The United States will continue to engage with Mexico and Canada to address the Agreement’s shortcomings and our trade deficits with these countries,” he said.
The USMCA will automatically expire July 1, 2036, unless all three member countries come to a new agreement.
Donald Trump initially lauded the deal when it was negotiated under his first administration in 2018 as a replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement. It went into full effect on July 1, 2020, and was designed to assist North American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses by creating a “more balanced, reciprocal trade” that would support job growth across the continent, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
Since then, the U.S. has exported trillions of dollars worth of goods and services through the arrangement, though that was apparently not enough to prevent Trump from souring on the trinational accord.
Trump opted instead to impose unprecedented duties and tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods after he returned to office in 2025, tearing the deal to shreds in the process. On June 10, the president insisted that the U.S. should have a more level playing field with its trade partners, claiming that America doesn’t need its neighbors’ goods and services.
“We don’t need anything that Canada has. We don’t need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” Trump told reporters at the time. “And they have to treat us better.”
Canada and Mexico are two of America’s top trading partners, cumulatively accounting for about a third of all U.S. exports, per the U.S. Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade statistics. Annually, the deal has provided the infrastructure for roughly $2 trillion in annual trade, according to data obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
But the lapsed trade agreement sets the stage for a larger debate over American economic relations that some economists estimate could take a long time to pin down. In the meantime, regional economies are expected to suffer from the lingering uncertainty.
Kelly Ann Shaw, who served as deputy director of the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term, told the Journal that the U.S. will likely morph the deal into something that could look much different from the USMCA.
“That process will carry on throughout the rest of the summer, if not into the end of this year,” she said.
