Washington’s blind spots on an important corner of federal policy have greatly influenced our national politics, and will likely do so again in 2028.
The following is a reprinting of the author’s note attached to the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s latest report, How Trade Enforcement Strengthens American Manufacturing, written and researched by Dr. Carolina Ferrerosa Young. You can read find the report in full here.
Now that the dust has settled on the midterm election, it’s clear we will have new majorities in Congress itching to deliver change. One policy area they will tackle is what to do about President Trump’s tariffs and trade enforcement policy.
But, from my experience in both the U.S. Senate and the White House, few policymakers and staff understand trade enforcement policy, its history, present day use, or why both the Trump and Biden administrations used executive authority to increase tariffs. By now, many are familiar with the “China Shock” concept: groundbreaking research showing that places in which jobs were offshored to China took a decade or more to recover, if they recovered at all. Most miss the other equally relevant finding in that research: loss of economic opportunity makes voters more likely to turn to ideological extremism. Absent spending a lot of time in manufacturing communities or working for a member of Congress that represents these areas, it is hard to understand what these communities have gone through over several decades or why the past two U.S. presidents supported dramatic shifts on tariffs and trade.
I include myself in that critique. My own views as a political scientist focused on economic inequality and as a native Virginian changed when I started working for a Midwestern Senator. When I was newly covering the economic portfolio for U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown and asked our state director to send me a list of places in Ohio that saw factory closures, he shocked me with: “We can’t find a small, medium, or large city in Ohio that hasn’t seen production go overseas to Mexico or China.”
When a factory leaves a town in America, workers lose their livelihoods and employer-sponsored benefits; but, there are other impacts too. Usually, the local small businesses relying on those customers fold. Houses become difficult if not impossible to sell. Schools lose revenue to provide basic services. Married couples are more likely to divorce. The economic destruction ripples through the fabric of a community, creating entrenched despair.
Local issues then impact the broader state of economic mobility in the United States. Despite having a labor market primarily composed of people without college degrees, free trade largely benefited college-educated workers while doing nothing to make college more affordable. There is no evidence unfettered free trade created more American jobs than the millions we lost in manufacturing. Offshoring decisions also targeted union dense sectors, reducing union density and collapsing the union wages that put upward pressure on the labor market to increase wages for all American workers.
The problem for the new Congress is that these issues are not new, yet run in tandem with other shifts in the economy and present-day circumstances. For many manufacturing communities, this economic loss was the foundation on which they experienced the financial crisis, corporations switching to lower paid contractors for jobs that used to be done in house, the collapse of economic mobility for workers without a college degree, present day rising inflation, ballooning credit card debt, housing costs, childcare costs, and higher education costs, to name a few.
I would argue this blind spot on trade policy and its impact for domestic manufacturers and workers also defined the conversation around economic power in recent presidential politics. There is a reason President Trump campaigned against NAFTA and liberalized trade with China in 2016 and won three Midwestern states where many jobs were concentrated. There is a reason President Biden campaigned on a ‘Made in America’ economic platform to reduce our reliance on foreign goods, increase domestic production, and revitalize American manufacturing, while pledging to avoid international trade agreements until large investments had been made in the middle class. President Trump continued to highlight these issues in 2024, winning those same states. For many working families that saw factories go overseas for decades on end with no action from Washington, someone was finally fighting for them. Understanding the history of trade enforcement policy, its impact for manufacturing communities, and the way these areas are often concentrated in Midwestern states will be critical to a road to the White House in 2028.
This report for the Alliance for American Manufacturing tries to help broaden bipartisan understanding by offering a window into this policy area. It sheds some light on the history of trade enforcement policy, uses case studies and site visits to demonstrate how manufacturers have used these policy tools over time, and underscores the work that needs to be done to support domestic producers in the face of unfettered unfair trade practices in the global marketplace. It is an area of the economy often poorly understood by macroeconomists, but critical to understanding the economy and our present-day politics. I urge the new Congress to not leave these workers and producers behind in the conversations ahead.