Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
President Biden signed an executive order yesterday expanding the government’s Buy American requirements.
What with all the purported concern over the gutting of American manufacturing, you’d think someone would have kept an eye on just how much offshoring our own government has been engaged in. In which case, you’d have thought wrong. How else to explain the somewhat stupefying fact that the most recent data we have on the share of federal government contracts on which foreign firms are allowed to bid is from 2010?
Decade-old though they may be, the figures which that study highlights make clear that when it comes to producing needed goods right here at home, we come in dead last. Here are the numbers from a story in today’s Washington Post:
In 2010, the most recent data available, the United States opened $837 billion in government contract competitions to foreign firms, more than twice the combined figure of the next five—the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Norway and Canada, according to the Government Accountability Office. The United States that year allowed foreign companies to bid on about 48 percent of its $1.7 trillion government procurement market while the other five put out to bid just 16 percent of their combined $2.4 trillion market.
That’s a lot of shopping abroad for strategic necessities—and not just face masks but also many high-tech products on which the Pentagon relies. As former Commerce Department official Clyde Prestowitz has pointed out, it was the work of U.S. scientists that developed the armed services’ night-vision capacities—but we then offshored the manufacturing of those materials to Asia. The Army may claim to “own the night,” but in actuality, it’s renting it.
Yesterday, President Biden signed an executive order expanding the government’s own Buy American requirements. The sea change that would bolster the government’s domestic procurement is yet to come—that will be part of the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure legislation that Biden will send to Capitol Hill later this year. After half a century in which the political clout of finance has risen while that of manufacturing and the labor movement has declined, Biden’s initiatives—particularly if the infrastructure bill makes it through Congress—constitute a long-overdue effort to right not just our economy, but our political economy as well. They’d still only amount to a down payment on rebuilding our much-diminished middle class, but even just the change in direction would be a big step forward.
