On December 5th, the day before a public hearing at the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), 35 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 6 Republican members of the U.S. Senate sent letters to the USTR urging it to advise President Trump not to place tariffs on imported solar cells. In their letters, the lawmakers drew attention to the negative impact on jobs, including manufacturing jobs, that import restrictions could have, and asked the Trump administration to "carefully and fully consider" these impacts on the "tens of thousands of solar workers in [their] states and on the hundreds of companies that employ them."