Michael Negron, senior fellow at the center, said lawmakers could then crack down on anticompetitive practices among the food industry’s largest players. “Give them some breathing room on grocery prices, provide some relief,” Negron urged. “Do that while creating space to undertake some bigger reforms that we think are important.”

According to the analysis by Michael Negron and Mimla Wardak, the administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement triggered a sharp increase in duties collected from American businesses. From April through September 2025, CAP estimated, the roughly 236,000 small-business importers in the U.S. paid an average of more than $151,000 in additional tariffs compared to the same period in 2024. (CAP cited the centrist Chamber of Commerce’s research on the small-business importer sector of the economy.)

“The Trump administration’s broad, costly, and frequently shifting policies threaten to undermine one of the strongest engines of the American economy,” Negron said in a statement to Fortune. “A season of opportunity for small businesses has turned into one of uncertainty.”

“You have more than 630,000 South Carolinians who receive their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act,” said Michael Negron, senior fellow for economic opportunity at the Center for American Progress. “Those premium tax credits are set to expire, and it’s increasingly clear they are not going to be extended in time.” Negron said the expiration could lead to significant “sticker shock” when premiums reset in January. Nationwide, more than 20 million Americans could be affected.

“The president has really tasked the administration with increasing the share of our federal contracts to put our values where our dollars are – to make sure that more of those contracts are going to small businesses,” Michael Negron, an assistant to the president for economic policy said in an interview with Spectrum News on Monday.