Trump’s export ban on protective equipment kicks in this week

The Trump administration’s ban on exports of some personal protective equipment to fight the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. will take effect Friday and will be in place for four months.

The publication of the new rule in the Federal Register is making official what President Donald Trump announced last week. The U.S. is following a number of other countries that have temporarily halted exports of crucial PPE in recent months. Among them are China—a significant source of the materials—as well as the European Union.

“We need the masks. We don’t want other people getting it,” Trump told reporters Monday. “That’s why we’re instituting a lot of Defense Production Act, you could call it, retaliations. If people don’t give us what we need for our people, we’re going to be very tough, and we’ve been very tough.”

The rule covers five types of protective equipment including N95 masks, surgical masks and gloves.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency “is issuing a temporary rule to allocate certain scarce or threatened materials for domestic use, so that these materials may not be exported from the United States without explicit approval by FEMA,” the notice stated.

The president had initially blocked shipments of N95 masks that 3M Co. intended to send to Canada and Latin America but reversed course on Monday. Trump said he’d reached an agreement with the company that would see it producing 55 million masks a month for U.S. health-care workers and import 167 million masks it makes in China.

The pact also allowed 3M to send the masks to Canada and Latin America after the company warned of significant humanitarian consequences if supplies were halted. What would happen to its shipments to other parts of the world remained uncertain.

The rule contains an exemption for covered materials that are made by or on behalf of U.S. manufacturers with continuous export agreements with customers in other countries if at least 80% of that manufacturer’s domestic production of these materials was distributed in the U.S. in the past year.

The agency, in administering the ban with Customs and Border Protection, will take into account supply-chain disruptions, humanitarian considerations and international relations, the order reads.