Well, it’s good we’re suddenly paying attention to postal logistics. Retailers, traders, and consumers are trying to figure out what U.S. President Donald Trump’s suspension—and then reimposition—of the postal service’s de minimis rule means. The end of customs-free imports for Chinese goods worth less than $800 was perhaps inevitable, and drugs and artificially cheap clothes should definitely have a harder time entering the United States. So far, though, the executive order has mostly led to chaos that has forced Trump to suspend the measure.

Allow me to nag: Knowing some Latin is exceedingly useful. Those who have had the privilege of learning this versatile language will know that de minimis means “about the smallest [things].” For the past nine years, the United States has been rather generous in its definition of the smallest things. The de minimis rule for goods coming into the country per post has been $800 since 2016, which means that only goods worth more than $800 are subject to customs fees. That can buy quite a lot, especially online.

China has been the big winner of this loophole, especially budget fashion manufacturers like Shein and Temu, which don’t have stores in the United States but ship almost everything directly to their U.S. consumers. (Shein has a warehouse in Indiana, from which it ships some items and also handles returns, and Temu announced last year that it was going to launch U.S. warehouses.)

For $800, one also gets quite a bit of fentanyl. The synthetic opioid that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, including nearly 75,000 in 2023, mostly arrives in small parcels from Mexico and China. Six years ago, Beijing imposed heavy restrictions on fentanyl, but crafty entrepreneurs instead began exporting the lethal drug’s essential components. Today, China is the world’s leading exporter of such precursor chemicals, according to an October 2024 report.

That makes the de minimis parcels arriving in the United States every day a mixed bag, and they’re growing at a dizzying rate. By last October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) was processing some 4 million de minimis shipments per day, up from 2.8 million per day in 2023. “Bad actors are exploiting this explosion in volume to traffic counterfeits, dangerous narcotics, and other illicit goods including precursor chemicals and materials such as pill presses and die molds used to manufacture fentanyl and other synthetic drugs that are killing Americans,” CBP noted.

It’s these drug packages that Trump tried to reduce with a Feb. 1 executive order ending the $800 de minimis rule for goods made in China. “I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the sustained influx of synthetic opioids has profound consequences on our Nation, including by killing approximately two hundred Americans per day, putting a severe strain on our healthcare system, ravaging our communities, and destroying our families,” he explained in the executive order.

De minimis shipments are a mixed bag—and an enormous one at that. Under a normal government, any change to de minimis rules would need to be carefully planned with CBP, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), FedEx, DHL, and other logistics companies. That didn’t happen. And now that the executive order has been signed, it has to be implemented, since lex dilationes abhorret—the law abhors delay.

As a result, the executive order has caused logistical turmoil. To begin with, there are the parcels that were midair when Trump signed the order. Then there are the ones that had just arrived but had not been processed yet by CBP. Remember, over 100,000 de minimis packages arrive in the United States every hour. Not all of them are from China, of course, but that just means that CBP has to go through all the parcels that have recently arrived and separate out the ones from China.

And then, CBP could, of course, destroy the fentanyl packages, but the legal shipments have to be stored somewhere and then returned to their senders, since it’s the sender—not the recipient—that pays customs duties.

Oh, and did I mention the packages in China awaiting shipment to the United States? Since customers are unlikely to want to pay more to absorb the customs costs, and Shein, Temu, and others would be likely to retroactively add to their bills, the parcels had to return to the sellers and refunds had to be initiated.

Facing this mess, shipping giants threw up their hands. USPS and other freight companies suddenly had to deal with tons of packages with unclear destinations—and even less clarity about who would pay. USPS announced it was going to stop handling parcels from China altogether. Then, on Feb. 7, the White House announced the executive order would be delayed to give federal agencies more time to prepare. That suspension was, in fact, inevitable.

It makes sense to close the loophole. The $800 de minimis was a globalization-era luxury. Those who thought it up seem not to have countenanced the possibility of it being used for drug shipments, or that Chinese fast-fashion retailers would systematically use it to undercut competitors that ship and sell their goods the traditional way, via bulk country-to-country shipments and sales to consumers from warehouses or shops within the United States. When it’s closed, that’s going to mean a substantial blow to firms like Temu and Shein, which may not win favor with some of Trump’s allies who have their own stakes in those firms.

This hastily composed executive order has mostly brought chaos upon the United States, and now there’s the embarrassment of having to delay its implementation. That seems to be a consistent pattern with the new administration’s shotgun approach to governance. Trump, let me introduce you to a motto coined by Emperor Augustus: festina lente—make haste slowly.