Negotiate multilateral and bilateral trade agreements

Research notes

• Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”. Flagged requires_congress at extraction, but the ask itself — negotiate — is executive, and that is what was measured. None of these instruments is a congressionally approved free trade agreement; they are executive agreements implemented by tariff proclamation under existing delegations. A reviewer who reads “trade agreements” to mean the congressionally approved kind would put this at not started, which is a different rung, so the boundary is flagged for the consistency pass.
• Related but distinct: #2102 (restore Trade Promotion Authority, not started) is the procedural machinery this Position wanted for exactly these negotiations, and it was never sought — the administration negotiated without it. #2106 (rejoin the TPP, not started) and #2104 (a WTO successor, not started) are the plurilateral asks that this bilateral record does not satisfy.
• The full list of Agreements on Reciprocal Trade was taken from USTR’s fact-sheet and press-release indexes for 2025 and 2026; the five cited above are the ones with Federal Register implementing instruments.
• Read 2026-09-03 (read-queue ticket 04): USTR’s own canonical list, and it confirms the shape. https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/agreements-reciprocal-trade (read 2026-09-03; the page carries no date of its own) lists ten instruments — Malaysia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Indonesia, Ecuador and Jordan. Four are styled “Agreement … on Reciprocal Trade” with a tariff schedule and a joint statement (Malaysia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and the AIT/TECRO instrument for Taiwan); four are frameworks towards an agreement (El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Ecuador); Indonesia and Jordan are announced as finalized. Every one is bilateral, and no multilateral or plurilateral instrument appears on the page at all — not even the critical-minerals plurilateral this item already carries. partial stands on §3b’s two-object rule: the bilateral object is delivered many times over, the multilateral object is not delivered at all, and ten more bilaterals cannot carry a two-object ask to done.
• The page’s list is not identical to the note above, which was built from USTR’s press-release indexes: North Macedonia, Thailand and Viet Nam are in the note and not on the page, and Indonesia, Taiwan and Jordan are on the page and not in the note. Neither list contradicts the other — the page is USTR’s current curation of concluded and framed agreements — and both point the same way on the multilateral half.
• A lead, not Evidence: USTR has dropped its “Agreements Under Negotiation” page. The canonical statement of what is being negotiated, ustr.gov/trade-agreements/agreements-under-negotiation, answers HTTP 403 up the whole ladder, and the parent page ustr.gov/trade-agreements no longer lists it: the child list is Agreements on Reciprocal Trade · Free Trade Agreements · Trade & Investment Framework Agreements · Bilateral Investment Treaties · Other Initiatives, and the extracted hrefs carry nothing else. A page vanishing from a site’s navigation is an observation, not a citation. The consequence for this item and for #2117 and #2104 is that the negatives below reach USTR’s published agreements, not its negotiating pipeline; a negotiation not yet announced is unreadable. ustr.gov has no sitemap (404) and its search box is the client-side Google CSE trap recorded in source-apis.md, so there is no enumeration route.