The applicable statute or law giving the President the authority to impose the tariffs is what also would allow for the Commerce Department, or Executive Branch to grant such tariff exemptions, and the law would likely sets the time allow to file and for he Department to respond to it. Procedures and exemption criteria would/should usually be found published in the Federal Register.

With no budget to take care of this sudden onslaught of exemption requests due to these new "across the board" wholesale tariff increases on American business, and with no apparent thought to using an "open" and "public" criteria in how these are to be evaluated, there are some truly great "horror stories" from more and more companies, about the almost comically random nature of exemption that have been granted or denied. It is so chaotic that one could easily imagine that they have Commerce Department summer interns "flipping coins" to decide.

In one case involving specialized steel cutting blades for printing machines, the company filed nine appeals for exemption for a product not available in the US. Some were just variations on thickness from the same material, 3 were granted, and 5 were not, with no reason given. In this case the business is a foreign company, that had actually located in the US, to manufacture for the North American market.

Oh, and by the way, I just saw another article about the "off of a cliff" 79% decline, over the last 2 years, in direct foreign investment in the acquisition of US companies, plants, or major research facilities ( e.g. like say a company like Siemens building a new locomotive assembly plant for the US market..).

UP is just one of many companies passing on these increased tariffs, in this case for long wearing high quality steel rail, to their shippers with higher charges, and/or to their stockholders in lower profits.