A Deplorable Basket of Buy American Executive Orders
We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and Hire American.
—President Donald J. Trump, Inauguration Speech, January 20, 201713
A key element of my strategic plan to populate the 2020 campaign with a strong MAGA message was a beautiful basket of Buy American, Hire American executive orders I had readied for the home stretch. These Action-Action-Action POTUS arrows were designed to add several exclamation points to the two most simple rules the Boss had set out in his 2017 Inauguration Speech. Yet, getting just about any of these Buy American executive orders signed before Election Day would turn out to be next to impossible—the Boss’s two simple rules notwithstanding.
Nor was this an aberration. As the director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, one of my primary missions was to strengthen and expand the federal government’s Buy American, Hire American policies. Yet, for the four full years I would spend in the administration, I would encounter stiff opposition both within the White House perimeter and from many of the cabinet secretaries and their deputies that Donald J. Trump himself had appointed.
At the cabinet level, Defense Secretary Mad Dog Mattis, King Rex Tillerson at the State Department, and Elaine Chao’s deputy Jeff Rosen at the Department of Transportation were particularly bitter anti-Buy American pills to swallow.
Inside the White House perimeter, my biggest Buy American opposition invariably came from first Gary Cohn and then Larry Kudlow in their roles as the director of the National Economic Council. Cohn and Kudlow were child’s play, however, compared to my epic throw downs with the Office of Management and Budget, first run by Mick Mulvaney as its director and then by Mulvaney’s protege Russ Vought.
What all of these zealots had in common was an extreme free market ideology. So whenever I would try to move a Buy American executive order through the NEC and OMB bureaucracies, the draft would inevitably come back from the staff secretary process littered with snarky comments about how the order was going to increase the costs of government.
“No Shite, Sherlock,” was always my first thought. Of course it’s going to cost more to require that we Buy American. But it’s also going to create more jobs and strengthen our manufacturing and defense industrial base.
My next thought was at least slightly more nuanced and went along the lines of: You free market zealots who never should have been allowed into a Trump White House just don’t get it. If American companies are competing in a world of unfair trade where countries like China, China, and China unmercifully subsidize their manufactured products, it will be impossible for American manufacturers to compete.
Along with tools like tariffs, Buy American policies help offset this unfair trade by giving preference to American companies. And such policies do so within clear economic boundaries. To wit: all Buy American statutes have very clear exemptions for both excessive costs and the possible scarcity of the item being procured.
And how’s this for nuance? For every dollar spent on Buy American government procurement, close to forty cents comes back to the government in the form of tax revenues.14 Put that in your OMB pipe and smoke it.
More often than not, however, it would be me who would get smoked in the West Wing, and it would be on more than one morning over the first three and a half years of the administration that I would wake up and ask myself: “Just what the hell is going on here?”
Yet, it would be during the last few months leading into Election Day that my chronic anger and frustration at the situation would morph into a sense of acute political urgency. This is because I knew that I had in my hot little hands a potent set of Buy American executive orders that could truly move the political needle, particularly in Blue Wall country.
One such order was designed to swiftly bring the United States Postal Service into conformance with our tough Buy American government procurement rules. My ulterior motive here—and it was pure politics given the Blue Wall stakes involved—was to make damn sure that when the USPS brain trust awarded a major pending $6 billion contract for a new fleet of almost two hundred thousand delivery vehicles, America’s Postal Service would indeed Buy American.
By getting that executive order signed expeditiously, this would send the appropriate Buy American signal to the bureaucrats at USPS not to buy vehicles made in India or Turkey. Rather, they should favor a joint purely domestic bid from the Oshkosh Defense Company and the Ford Motor Company.
To be Blue Wall clear here, Oshkosh Defense—do not confuse it with the blue jean company—has a very large corporate headquarters and factory footprint in Wisconsin while Ford’s humongous footprint in Michigan rivals that of the Abominable Snowman.
I personally visited the Oshkosh corporate mothership in Wisconsin twice. The first time was with the Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer in 2019, and I was sad to see both the witty and urbane Spencer—and my access to his beautiful Pentagon Gulfstream jet—disappear when Rich was fired after exhibiting a wave of Never-Trump pique.
The second time I visited Oshkosh Defense was with the National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien in the weeks before the 2020 election. This was strictly a “no Hatch Act violation” policy trip—wink, wink. Never mind the major press conference Robert and I held that day touting the political virtues of President Trump’s policies in creating great manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin.
And this may amuse you: with O’Brien at the wheel and me bouncing around in the back jump seat on a dare from O’Brien’s deputy Alex Gray, Robert drove one of Oshkosh’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicles around its Afghanistan-lite mini-mountainous test course.
I am happy to report Brother O’Brien acquitted himself quite well. At one point, we barreled up an almost 40 degree incline in that heavily armored JLTV beast. It made a Humvee look like a little red wagon. Too much fun.
The sad MAGA post script here: this USPS Buy American executive order would indeed get signed, but on January 14, 2021, well after the election. It was a waste of some very good ammunition, and all because of Bad Personnel interacting with Bad Process and a feckless Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Chinese Drones at Twelve O’Clock
A second Buy American executive order I had ready to roll was a real beauty that would have cleared America’s skies of made-in-China drones—at least the skies over government lands. This order was designed to prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to procure Chinese drones at agencies like the Department of Interior, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security.
It was insane that we had Chinese drones flying like swarms in the skies of America. It was insane because the Communist Chinese company known as DJI that makes most of these compact little flying spies has a clause right in its contract with its customers that it has the right to export all of the video footage collected by American users right back to servers on the Chinese mainland.15
That, in turn, means that if the Pentagon is flying DJI drones over our missile silos or the Department of Interior is flying drones over sensitive government lands, the Chinese Communist Party is going to get beautiful 4K footage of it to use for anything from precision missile strikes to the sabotage of our infrastructure.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to provide such high resolution footage of the American terrain to the People’s Liberation Army courtesy of the US government and American taxpayers surely needs to get over more often to the Situation Room for classified briefings. Or maybe just read the frigging newspaper. It’s not like the fact that the CCP is out to conquer the world is a state secret.
Quick story here: When I found out that the Department of Interior was using Communist Chinese drones in January 2020, I called up one of my favorite people in government, the Secretary of Interior David Bernhardt. He literally had those drones grounded by the end of the day.16 God, I miss doing stuff like that.
By the way, like the Postal Service order, this particular executive order did indeed get signed. But again, it was weeks after the election. At least it got done.
Death by Kudlow for American PCBs
Still a third executive order I had queued up would have prevented the procurement of printed circuit boards from foreign sources. PCBs are the tiny little engines that drive virtually all of our electronics in both our commercial and military spaces, and this is an industry that has tremendous implications for both economic security and national security.
Absent such an executive order, it would be impossible for us to bring PCB manufacturing back onshore. Did I mention that America was the country that invented PCBs to begin with?
This particular printed circuit board order was based almost verbatim on an absolute beauty I had previously worked up with the Department of Energy to cut off the procurement of bulk power equipment from Communist China to the United States. POTUS signed the bulk power executive order on May 1, 2020—one of my rare China victories. Yet I must report here with deep regret that Joe Biden suspended this order in one of his first acts as president.17
Given the high national security stakes involved, the cancellation of this bulk power EO was just inexplicable stupidity—inexplicable, that is unless you believe that the “Biden crime family” really exists and is really and truly compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Now that would be a helluva movie—Joe as the Godfather, Joe’s brother James as the consigliere, and Hunter as an amalgam of the ineptness of Fredo and rashness of Sonny.
At any rate, some of my MAGA-friendly folks at the Pentagon loved that bulk power order so much they wanted to do a similar one for printed circuit boards. They knew that just too many of America’s weapon systems were vulnerable to the Chinese PCBs that are all too often used to construct such systems.
Alas, this particular Chinese PCB order would die a prolonged death due to internal globalist opposition and never see the light of day or ink from the POTUS pen. Larry Kudlow not surprisingly would deliver the death blow.
Kudlow’s snuffing of my Chinese PCB order was nothing, however, compared to the torture and systematic dismemberment of an executive order I had drafted early in the administration to restrict the offshoring of American jobs. This particular order would play Blue Wall Whale to my Moby Dick for four long years as I tried in vain to get it to the finish line.
Don’t Call Me Ahab
In early 2017, a very angry POTUS called me over to the Oval and told me to write an executive order that would come down like a Zeus lightning bolt on any American multinational company that had the temerity to shut down a factory in the United States and offshore its production to Mexico, China, or to any other country in the big wide world not named the United States of America.
I had been summoned to the Oval after the Boss had been triggered by a company that had just announced it was closing its doors and moving its production to Mexico. This south-of-the-border offshoring was being done not just anywhere but in freaking Ohio where we could not possibly be reelected if we lost the Buckeye State.
The Boss’s attitude as I walked into the Oval was: “How dare these sons of corporate bitches? Don’t they understand that they are about to feel my full wrath?”
“That would not be so easy,” thought I. My problem in crafting such an order was that I didn’t really have any obvious sharp legal tools in the shed that could apply anything near the appropriate punishment—and thereby establish appropriate disincentives to such offshoring. So for an agonizing few days, I was in a quandary, worried that at any minute I would get a call from the Boss asking, “Where the hell is my executive order?”
To square this legal circle, I sought the help of one of my favorite people on the Democrat side of the fence—Lori Wallach of Public Citizen. Both Lori and Public Citizen began pounding President Trump early in the administration for continuing to allow the offshoring of American jobs by big US multinational companies despite promises on the campaign trail to stop it dead in its tracks.
In a particularly brutal statistics-based critique of our offshoring policies, here’s what Wallach and Public Citizen had to say about our performance:
[S]hortly after arriving in office, President Trump declared “Buy American, Hire American” as a guiding tenet of his presidency. Yet as we mark President Trump’s first 100 days, the Trump Administration continues to reward—not punish—U.S. companies that offshore U.S. jobs.18
Here is what really what caught my eye when I continued reading Public Citizen’s critique:
[I]f President Trump is serious about delivering on his pledges to stop offshoring and create more manufacturing jobs in America, he could immediately invoke his executive authority over federal procurement decisions, one of the most effective tools at his disposal to help U.S. workers.19
After reading that passage, I immediately called Lori and simply said to her: “Do tell.” And from that discussion was born a clever way to link, by executive order, the awarding of government procurement contracts to good versus bad offshoring behavior.
The central and simple idea embodied in the executive order was this: if a big multinational company wanted to offshore American jobs, we would make it a lot more difficult for that company to bid on, and win, government procurement contracts.
This was indeed a brilliant idea—thank you, Lori—because most of the multinational manufacturing companies in America who are guilty of the most egregious forms of offshoring also have substantial US government contract work.
For example, in any given year, companies from General Electric, Honeywell, and United Technologies to Dell, Ford, Textron, and IBM are awarded billions of dollars in government contracts. Yet, as the research of Public Citizen illustrated, these big, bad, salute-no-American-flag multinationals are also responsible for the offshoring of thousands of jobs annually.20
Here, then, was the yin and yang of my proposed order: On the yin side for offshoring, we would tack on a 20 percent price disincentive. So, for example, if a cost bid came in at $10 million, we would treat it as if it were a $12 million bid, thereby making it much more difficult for the company to win the bid.
On the good behavior yang side, we would use a price incentive to lower the sticker price of the bid by 20 percent if the company was not engaged in significant offshoring but rather embraced the MAGA ideal of Made in America production. So that same $10 million bid would be treated as if it were $8 million and thereby enhance the bidder’s chance of winning.
Of course, I absolutely loved this offshoring executive order from the moment I drafted it—just as much as the globalists within the West Wing hated it from the moment I pitched it to the president. That was indeed my perennial problem as this particular Moby Dick of an order would sit gathering globalist dust for more than three years.
Over that three-year period, first Gary Cohn and then Larry Kudlow at the National Economic Council did everything they could to block it. So, too, did Steve Mnuchin, Jared Kushner, Rob Porter, Derek Lyons, Chris Liddell, and every other globalist inside the West Wing.
Yet, in the summer of year four of the administration, during the months leading up to the election, I was able to breathe new life into this offshoring executive order. I was able to opportunistically do this during a chance conversation with the Boss when he was once again complaining about offshoring.
In that meeting, I explained to the Boss that I had this great offshoring order sitting in the dustbin in my office, and he told me to dust that puppy off. Yet, that was the bitch of it in the Trump White House: even if the Boss said “let’s do this” on a Monday, by the following Monday, he might change his mind after a gaggle of globalists worked to convince him whatever “this” happened to be was a bad idea.
So once again, my offshoring Moby Dick got away. The order, meeting stiff resistance, died its one thousandth death. But call me Ishmael here, not Ahab—if you have a literary bent, you’ll get my drift.
A Buy American WTO Nightmare
In the spirit of saving the worst abomination for last, one final Tear Down That Blue Wall Buy American executive order that got away from me would have had us withdraw from a trade deal the United States had signed under the umbrella of POTUS’s bête noire, the World Trade Organization (WTO).
This particular deal, known as the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) was a direct affront to the sacrosanct Trump concept of Buy American. It was also a direct assault on the strengthen American manufacturing leg of the iron triangle of Trump Populist Economic Nationalism. This is because under our Buy American rules, it is supposed to be domestic—not foreign—manufacturers that sell to the US government.
Yet, on January 1, 1995, the US government signed the WTO’s GPA.21 This exceedingly anti-Buy American trade deal thereby committed the United States to treating nearly fifty different countries—including every country in Europe—as if they were American for the purpose of bidding on US government procurement contracts.22
Yikes! Just think about that for a minute.
Under the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Government Procurement, countries like Germany, France, Great Britain, Singapore, and Turkey, are all now treated as America in the eyes of our procurement contract officers inside the US government.
That’s not just insane. It was also a particular sacrilege inside an administration that featured a president who insisted—I remind you of this once again—that his two most “simple rules” of governing were “Buy American, Hire American.”
What drove me and folks like Lori Wallach nuts about this WTO Buy American giveaway is that, at least according to the research of her organization Public Citizen, foreign countries received far more of America’s government procurement dollars than American companies received from bidding on foreign projects.23 Yep, this was just another case where America was getting fleeced in a one-sided trade agreement.
What galled me most about this whole situation is that the WTO’s GPA was the easiest agreement imaginable to get out of. No fuss, no muss, no chance of foreign recriminations. All our United States trade representative had to do was send the WTO a note of our withdrawal, and it would be a done deal in sixty days.
If we had, in fact, undone that GPA deal, this would have been a powerful MAGA signal to the Blue Wall and a great boon for American manufacturers. And here was the real beauty of it all:
This Bannonite action stopped far short of the draconian step of leaving the WTO—that would have been far too disruptive right before the election. Yet, withdrawing from the WTO GPA nonetheless would have sent a very clear signal both to Geneva and to the American heartland that Donald J. Trump is not a man to be trifled with or fleeced in any trade deal.
These obvious political and policy benefits notwithstanding, the West Wing’s confederacy of globalists would fight me tooth and nail on this proposed action right up to the bitter November 3 end. As this bad Moliere farce unfolded, I thought to myself: “If we can’t even get this done, what the hell are we here for?”
***
In the next chapter, we will bring to a close our discussion of the iron MAGA triangle of Populist Economic Nationalism by showcasing the one major Buy American executive order that I would get signed exactly when, where, and in the way I wanted in the months leading up to the 2020 election.
This part of the story thereby provides an important capstone to our “Blue Wall Failed to Crumble” tale because it underlines the importance of both tariffs as a tool to defend America’s blue-collar working classes and the very critical need to bring back to American shores the production of our essential medicines.
Writ large, the whirlwind Whirlpool event you are about to bear witness to also aptly showcases what could have, would have, and should have been our Populist Economic Nationalist strategy to tear down that Blue Wall.