Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

26. Trade · Notable · Contested — excluded from counts

Enact mutual recognition agreements with allied high-standard countries

Not started

808 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”

“The U.S. should enact mutual recognition agreements for a wide variety goods with the United Kingdom, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other governments with high standards comparable to our own.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No mutual recognition agreement was concluded with any of the governments the Quote names. The instruments the administration reached with them are of a different kind: the U.S.-United Kingdom Economic Prosperity Deal implemented by Executive Order 14309 on 2025-06-16, the U.S.-Japan Agreement implemented by Executive Order 14345 on 2025-09-04, the U.S.-EU Framework of 2025-09-25, the U.S.-Korea Strategic Trade and Investment Deal of 2025-12-04 and the U.S.-Taiwan Trade and Security Agreement of 2026-05-28 are tariff and market-access arrangements, not agreements to accept each other's conformity assessment across a wide variety of goods. Where standards do appear, recognition runs one way: the Agreements on Reciprocal Trade have the partner accept U.S. or international standards for U.S.-made goods without extra conformity assessment, which is the opposite of mutuality. The only movement in the window on an existing MRA was subtractive: FDA revoked 21 CFR part 26 on 2026-02-19, the regulations implementing the U.S.-European Community mutual recognition agreement, as superseded by the 2017 Amended Pharmaceutical Annex that remains in force.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”.
  • The FDA revocation is recorded because it is the only in-window instrument touching an MRA with a named partner, and because a later pass could mistake it for a repudiation. It is not: the rule says the regulations were superseded by the 2017 U.S.-EU Amended Sectoral Annex for Pharmaceutical GMPs, which is itself the operative MRA and predates the window. It is housekeeping, and it leaves the mutual recognition in place.
  • Adjacent and not counted: the FCC’s rule of 2025-08-07 tightened recognition of foreign telecommunications certification bodies and test labs operating under existing MRAs, barring bodies owned or controlled by prohibited entities. That narrows conformity-assessment recognition on security grounds; it is not addressed to allied high-standard countries and does not move this ask either way. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/07/2025-14970/promoting-the-integrity-and-security-of-telecommunications-certification-bodies-measurement
  • Negative searches: Federal Register full text, both "mutual recognition agreement" (6) and "mutual recognition agreements" (5) — singular and plural give different sets, and neither contains a new agreement. The 2025 Annual Report’s annex of agreements in force lists the existing MRAs with the EU, the EEA EFTA States and Switzerland, all pre-window.
  • Negative search, 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04), and its stated limit. USTR’s own Agreements on Reciprocal Trade page (https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/agreements-reciprocal-trade, read 2026-09-03, undated) lists ten instruments — Malaysia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, Ecuador, Jordan. None of the five governments the Quote names appears on it, and none of the ten is a mutual recognition agreement; they are tariff-schedule instruments. The limit matters and is recorded here rather than buried: this negative covers USTR’s published agreements list, not its negotiating pipeline. USTR’s “Agreements Under Negotiation” page 403s up the whole ladder and has been dropped from the parent page’s own child list, so whether an MRA is under negotiation and unannounced cannot be read at all. See #2120’s note for the enumeration routes that were tried and failed.
Action
create
Object
Mutual recognition agreements with allied governments
ID
2117