One furniture importer just spent more than 100 staff hours answering a single Customs challenge. TOV Furniture co-founder and CEO Bruce Krinsky says his company faced a query on 17 import entries from Vietnam — and responded with over 1,000 pages of documentation.

"We provided 1,000+ pages of documentation. Compiling it and responding consumed well over 100 hours of my team's time," Krinsky wrote in a LinkedIn post. "I've personally visited these factories. Wood is cut and machined there; frames are built there; fabric and foam are cut there; sewing, upholstery, assembly and packaging happen there. Some components may come from China. That's a global supply chain, not [illegal] transshipment."

His case is not an outlier. It is the sharpest illustration yet of a shift that has accelerated through 2025: while tariff headlines have quieted, the enforcement machinery behind them has sharpened considerably.

A quiet summer, a louder border

The summer was relatively calm on the tariff front. A trade war with Canada flared up, producing new duties on both sides, but the frantic zigzagging of duties that marked last year largely subsided. That lull masks a new intensity at sea level — the day-to-day work of Customs and Border Protection, which tracks what enters the country and ensures duties get paid.

The White House has taken several concrete steps since the start of the year. In June, President Trump signed an executive order titled "Strengthening Customs Enforcement," which sets a more forceful posture for federal agencies monitoring trade. The rules mandate a high floor for penalties, tighten restrictions on who can act as an importer of record, and demand a far more extensive accounting of supply chain receipts.

Then, in August, the White House released a report titled "The Great Transshipment Scam." It outlined what the administration sees as a critical failure of the import system: companies avoiding tariffs by rerouting goods through lesser-tariffed countries and claiming a false point of origin. The report pegs the total value of illegally transshipped goods in the tens of billions of dollars every year.

A whole-of-government dragnet

The executive order and the report are only the latest escalations in an ongoing effort. Nicole Bivens Collinson, an attorney specializing in international trade and government relations at Miami firm Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, describes Trump's second term as a "new era" — one in which the entire federal government cracks down on customs issues rather than leaving the work to a single agency.

"Normally it's been Customs [dealing with import enforcement]," she told Business of Home. "Now the Department of Justice is stepping in. We're seeing the FCC starting to get involved in trade issues. We're seeing the FTC, which has to do with labeling. We're even seeing the CPSC getting involved."

The approach, in a word, is aggressive. "They're going after everyone, guns blazing," she says. "The number of [customs inquiries] that have increased is exponential. We had one client who got over 30 on the same day, on the same supply chain."

Vietnam in the crosshairs

Transshipping is a fraught topic among furniture importers in particular. During Trump's first term, many producers shifted manufacturing away from China — often to Vietnam — to dodge the first round of tariffs. That produced more complex supply chains in which components and materials shipped from China were incorporated into manufacturing processes elsewhere. Genuine illegal transshipment is talked about more than it is practiced, especially by scale importers. The risk was always high. Now it is very high.

The heightened scrutiny is hitting home goods importers directly, as Krinsky's case shows. But for most importers, the biggest burden of the new era is not penalties — it is the drain on resources required to keep up with, and follow, the rules.

"Costs for compliance have gone through the roof," says Bivens Collinson. "Before, I think the C-suite looked at the customs people as a nuisance. I think now the C-suite is going: 'If we don't have a compliance team, if we don't have good compliance, it's really going to cost us.'"

That cost pressure carries commercial consequences beyond the compliance department. Intense oversight is creating new expenses and complexity for importers — and likely contributing to home goods inflation at the shelf.

A possible silver lining

There may be an industry-wide upside. The new rules require brands to develop a much deeper level of supply chain awareness, down to the raw materials — "from Earth to hearth," as Bivens Collinson quips. The regulations are designed to catch cheaters, but they may have the knock-on effect of positioning brands to make better decisions around ethical production and sustainability.

"The food industry has had a tracking system forever, so it can absolutely be done," she says, noting that new visibility may help companies sell more effectively into regions such as the European Union. "Some of those countries have very strict environmental rules, and they may require that you know the species and the genus of the wood that was used. This would set you up to have that [level of] visibility."

For importers, the calculus is now straightforward: document everything, from factory floor to final assembly, or budget for the inquiry that follows. With the June executive order and the August transshipment report as its foundation, the administration's enforcement posture points toward more inquiries, stiffer penalties and deeper supply chain audits in the months ahead — regardless of how quiet the tariff headlines remain.