Biden Admin Officials Go Deeper on What it Means to Be ‘Made in America’
Politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to use “Made in America” goods as a talking point—but policy and infrastructure helps move those goods through the supply chain.
The Alliance of American Manufacturing (AAM) held an event Thursday to discuss the role of policy on goods made in the United States, which the trade organization has a keen interest in moving forward.
Governmental leaders, and the head of one private apparel company, gathered to share their insights on how policy to encourage domestic manufacturing has changed over the past several years under the Biden administration—and what their vision for the future includes.
Watch on FN
Heather Boushey, chief economist for the Biden administration’s Invest in America Cabinet, said the Covid-19 pandemic—among other events that showed the instability of global supply chains—kicked some of that policy and thinking into gear at the outset of Biden’s term.
“What we make in America and how we make it became core to thinking about this pivot that the President wanted to do to change the economy, so [that] we didn’t just build back from the pandemic, but that we built back better,” Boushey.
She noted that the Biden-Harris administration has taken steps to do that in several key ways: by thinking about how to build a fair and competitive domestic market, rather than focusing only internationally and by making strategic investments in industries that could grow in the U.S. market.
“The point of our economic policy is for workers to be paid a good wage, for families to thrive, for communities to thrive. That’s the ultimate outcome we’re looking for. It flows through having competitive, viable industries…but we are taking every step we can to make sure we are always coming at our industrial strategy with a worker-first approach,” she said.
For the Biden administration, that has included a consistent commitment to workers and their unions, in turn earning the soon-to-depart world leader the nickname, “Union Joe.”
Critics of the Biden-Harris administration’s plan for manufacturing have said that, at the moment, the effects of the policies and funding it has put into place aren’t apparent. Boushey said the more visible growth will appear in communities in time, once the funds released by the Biden administration have been used to fully build and staff facilities.
“We’re building a lot of new manufacturing, and that’s awesome, but the jobs haven’t shown up yet, and at least in places I visited, it’s because the factories are still…[being put] together. They’re still putting roofs on things; they’re not done yet, so that’s still to come. I think it’s hard for communities to say, unless you’re in that inner circle,” she explained.
Some communities have already begun to embrace existing or in-progress manufacturing facilities that stand to add jobs to their local economies. Mark Gitenstein, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, said that, growing up, his small-town community in Alabama was vibrant, in large part due to his father’s apparel manufacturing business, which employed a large portion of the town’s residents.
When that factory eventually shut down because of the ways offshoring became cheaper, Gitenstein said, it took a massive toll on the community he grew up in.
“That factory was a lot more than an economic statistic. It was a livelihood, a social network, a work family,” he said, noting that the population of his hometown has significantly decreased in the years since the factory shut down.
For Gitenstein, the reality of being among Washington’s policy makers while watching friends from another part of his life struggle against a once-thriving factory town has been a harsh contrast. While he said administrations gone by have furthered the offshoring strategy for many industries, including apparel and textiles, the current administration has made an effort to bring some manufacturing home.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, we recognize the old approach no longer holds. We can no longer ignore the consequences for our workers and for domestic manufacturing. We cannot afford to continue pursuing policies that solely facilitate the delivery of low-cost goods to consumers without considering their environmental impacts or pitting workers against each other across…global supply chains,” Gitenstein said.
While textile and apparel items made start to finish in the United States are a rarity, some manufacturers, like American Giant, have managed to crack the code. But providing living wages, working with all-domestic supply chain partners and creating a finished product at an affordable price have not come without their challenges, Bayard Winthrop, the company’s CEO, said.
“We all are smart enough to understand the benefit of being able to have a $4 T-shirt versus a $12 T-shirt. I understand that, but at what cost to our fellow citizens?” Winthrop said.
He went on to note that, like Gitenstein’s town, places that feel the negative impacts of encouraging offshoring—no matter how low it makes the cost to produce—have faced serious hardship when it comes to morale and providing for themselves and their families.
“When you go into those towns and you see it up close, it feels like a death—it feels like, wow, this town that was vibrant, that had a heartbeat…is now hollowed out, and people that are there don’t have jobs,” he said. “They feel like they’re completely left behind, and I don’t think we are humanizing the cost of that policy enough.”
Daleep Singh, the Biden administration’s deputy national security advisor for international economics, said that China continues to flood certain industries with excess supply that is not in line with global demand, which, in turn, exhausts and kills competition from other countries.
To compete with that, Singh said the Biden administration has been working on a strategy that would protect the security of the national economy and the people affected by it.
“Number one…we’re going to make investments at home to strengthen and scale our productive capacity. Number two, we want partnerships with countries playing by the same rules, to give each other access to our productive capacity and our purchasing power,” Singh said. “Number three, for countries not playing by the same rules, we are going to use restrictive tools like tariffs to prevent our investments from getting undercut.”
Simultaneously, the president has plans to continue to provide for domestic manufacturing growth, even as he prepares to turn the reins over to the winner of the 2024 election come January. Singh said there’s still an intense desire among the administration to ensure the U.S. has a chance to be competitive in a number of industries where manufacturing is key.
“The better we are at building and producing, the better we’re going to be at innovating, and…that’s why we can’t outsource an industry like manufacturing abroad and think that we’re going to have prosperity and equity in our society,” Singh said. “Comparative advantage is created. It compounds, and it does not happen by chance.”
