WASHINGTON — For several weeks this spring, a handful of employees at a Texas steel manufacturer stopped producing pipes used to drill thousands of feet below the earth’s surface to concentrate full time on another task: trying to win the company an exemption from President Trump’s metals tariffs.

Borusan Mannesmann Pipe U.S. filed 19 separate requests with the Commerce Department asking it to exempt the multiple shapes, sizes and forms of steel pipes that it imports from its parent company in Turkey and then finishes at a plant in Baytown, Tex. Until it gets an answer, the 60-year-old business is paying significantly higher prices for imports of the raw material and is putting off any major projects.

In the two months since the Trump administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs went into effect, the Commerce Department has been deluged with more than 8,200 exemption requests from companies that import foreign metals. With just a handful of countries temporarily exempted from Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, companies are scrambling to win exemptions for every screw and spring they import, with each width and length requiring stand-alone filings. One company alone has submitted 1,167 of the filings, according to government officials.

The imposition of tariffs was supposed to help protect American companies from foreign competition. But they have also created a chaotic, time-consuming process and provoked deep uncertainty among executives, who are delaying investment, expansion and hiring as a result.