Overview

Background

Greer is an American trade attorney and former Air Force officer, born August 16, 1980. He attended Brigham Young University, where he also served as a Mormon missionary. He graduated with a B.A. in International Studies from Brigham Young University. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and a joint Master in Global Business Law from Sciences Po and the Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Earlier in his career, Greer served in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General's Corps, including a deployment to Iraq. After leaving military service, he entered the private practice of trade law. His practice focused on trade measures, export and import regulation, industrial policy, and government advocacy, and he represented clients in international trade litigation before the Department of Commerce, the International Trade Commission, and federal courts. He later became a partner at King and Spalding, a Washington law firm with a prominent international trade practice.

Greer's most formative professional experience came during Trump's first term. He returned to USTR after previously serving as Chief of Staff to Ambassador Robert Lighthizer during Trump's first term, in which role he was deeply involved in the administration's implementation of tariffs on China and the subsequent negotiation of the U.S.-China Phase One Agreement, and was a critical part of USTR's efforts to negotiate and obtain congressional approval for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). That combination of operational experience, legal training, and close association with Lighthizer—the intellectual godfather of Trumpian trade policy—made Greer a natural choice when the president began assembling his second-term economic team.

Public Role in the Second Trump Administration

Tariffs and the Reciprocal Trade Agenda

As a key member of President Trump's cabinet, Greer has made it a priority to put America First on trade by combating unfair foreign trade practices, expanding market access for Made in America products, and ensuring the United States has balance and reciprocity in its trading relationships. That agenda translated quickly into sweeping tariff action. The bilateral deals with China and the United Kingdom came into focus nearly six weeks after President Trump unveiled a wide-ranging reciprocal tariff regime in a "Liberation Day" ceremony on April 2, 2025. The announcement triggered a sudden market panic, forcing the president to put the tariffs on pause days later, after which the administration repeatedly tweaked, reimposed, and re-delayed those tariffs over subsequent months.

Greer has been an unapologetic advocate for the tariff program and has sought to provide it with intellectual grounding beyond campaign rhetoric. In a 2025 year-end op-ed, he argued that 2025 would be remembered as the year of the tariff regardless of one's economic ideology, and that the real question is whether trade patterns serve the national interest—which, for the Trump administration, means a trade policy that accelerates re-industrialization.

Bilateral Negotiations and Deal-Making

Greer has been the administration's lead negotiator in a series of bilateral trade discussions that followed the Liberation Day tariff shock. On May 12, 2025, Greer and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an agreement with Chinese trade negotiators to roll back most of the tariffs that had been imposed by both countries, with the United States agreeing to reduce tariffs on most Chinese imports to 30 percent, down from 145 percent. The arrangement was described as a temporary truce rather than a comprehensive settlement, with compliance reviews continuing into 2026.

A parallel framework agreement with the United Kingdom emerged around the same time. USTR later announced the successful conclusion of a U.S.-United Kingdom arrangement on pharmaceutical pricing, one element of a broader set of bilateral understandings. Greer also signed a U.S.-Jordan Agreement on Reciprocal Trade in July 2026, part of a broadening pattern of bilateral frameworks that has become the administration's preferred alternative to multilateral trade negotiations.

Section 301 Enforcement and Forced Labor Tariffs

Beyond reciprocal tariff negotiations, Greer has deployed Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 aggressively as an enforcement tool. In February 2025, the Trump administration announced that the Department of Commerce would no longer be accepting Section 232 exclusion requests for steel and aluminum products, and no new exclusions would be granted. Additionally, the vast majority of Section 301 exclusions on Chinese goods have been allowed to expire, and the administration is not currently accepting new Section 301 exclusion requests on goods from China, though it has extended 178 pre-existing exclusions as part of ongoing trade negotiations.

In early June 2026, USTR proposed additional tariffs of up to 12.5 percent on imports from 60 economies, with the new Section 301 duties to be imposed in response to alleged forced labor issues. Greer said those proposed tariffs would cover "about 99% of our trade," and USTR telegraphed the approach when it announced investigations into the 60 economies in mid-March 2026, one day after unveiling a separate set of Section 301 probes centered on possible excess manufacturing capacity concerns.

Legal Authority and the IEEPA Question

The Supreme Court's ruling on the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act injected a significant complicating dynamic into trade discussions. The administration had relied on IEEPA as the legal foundation for the sweeping reciprocal tariffs, and the Court's ruling placed constraints on that authority. Greer issued a statement in response to the decision and the administration subsequently worked to reconstruct its tariff program through alternative legal mechanisms, including Section 301 actions—precisely the tool his office is currently using most actively.

Recent Developments

On April 22, 2026, Greer testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, where the administration's approach to tariff exclusions was a central point of contention. As Greer's testimony made clear, the second Trump administration has not been receptive to exclusion requests. In his testimony, Greer cited data showing that since the introduction of the president's reciprocal trade program in April 2025 through February 2026, the U.S. trade deficit in goods decreased by 24 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Critics at the Council on Foreign Relations and elsewhere have noted that while the goods trade deficit has narrowed, workers' wages and manufacturing's share of the economy have declined slightly over the same period.

In July 2026, Greer issued a statement on the European Union creating uncertainty in the transatlantic trade relationship, a signal that negotiations with Brussels remain unresolved and contentious. USTR also announced a joint statement with Mexican Secretary of Economy Marcelo Ebrard in July 2026, reflecting ongoing management of the USMCA relationship ahead of the agreement's scheduled joint review. As of late July 2026, Greer was signaling another round of tariff action, the latest indication that the White House is working to re-create the protectionist trade agenda on new legal foundations after the IEEPA ruling.

Outlook

Greer occupies an unusual position in the Trump second-term cabinet: a technically sophisticated operator who is simultaneously the public face of a trade agenda that has generated both significant economic disruption and measurable shifts in trade flows. The administration's claim that tariffs are reducing the trade deficit and expanding export markets has some support in aggregate data, though the picture on wages and manufacturing employment is more ambiguous. How the program fares in the next phase will depend heavily on whether bilateral frameworks convert into durable agreements, whether the forced labor Section 301 investigations result in tariff actions that survive further legal challenges, and how the USMCA joint review process unfolds.

Greer has shown willingness to engage with critics in public forums—at the Council on Foreign Relations, Hudson Institute, and before Congress—while defending the program's premises robustly. His background as both a first-term insider and a sophisticated trade litigator gives him credibility with the business and legal communities that few in the administration share. Whether that credibility is enough to sustain a trade agenda of unusual ambition and legal novelty remains the central question around his tenure.