[CTC] Trade transition team & more speculation on USTR pick

Wed Nov 11 06:39:01 PST 2020

Several items below….

Politico Morning Trade

— President-elect Joe Biden announced his agency transition teams on Tuesday, including the crews who will work with the agencies led by outgoing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and outgoing U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

TRANSITION 2020: JASON MILLER TO LEAD USTR TRANSITION TEAM: We could still have to wait another month or more to find out who Biden has picked to be the next U.S. trade representative. But on Monday, his team announced that former Obama White House adviser Jason Miller will lead the transition effort at USTR.

Miller, who is not widely known in trade circles, is a former deputy director at the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the president. He joined the White House in 2010 and served the rest of Obama’s terms.

He worked on Obama's efforts to boost domestic manufacturing jobs and deal with Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis. He also was involved in the development of the vehicle fuel efficiency standards that the Trump administration has tried to roll back.

Miller will be assisted by 14 other volunteers <https://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=d04ce8633df0ead1fbec5eb4894606f89630cc0877476400f3bea8e94782aaed22250c69cdeae98fa7dad715f0be5eba>, including Celeste Drake, who formerly was the AFL-CIO’s trade policy lead. She now is at the Director’s Guild of America.

Todd Tucker, a trade policy expert at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, is also on board, along with Arun Venkataraman, a former USTR and Commerce Department official who is now at Visa Inc., and Brad Sester, a former deputy assistant Treasury secretary for international economic analysis currently on leave from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Others include former International Trade Administration Assistant Secretary Ted Dean, who now serves as public policy head for file-sharing firm Dropbox, and former National Economic Council adviser and USTR official Elizabeth Kelley, who is currently on leave from the Urban Institute, where she is a vice president for philanthropic partnerships.

The gang appears to be more diverse than Trump’s USTR landing team,  <https://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=d04ce8633df0ead1aa0aaeca62d9a2559f851b70e3b7c3f123478cb840fccce5ddef69c500108d68a6d6122dc352d602>which included former Nucor Steel CEO Dan DiMicco and several steel industry lawyers. The latter included Robert Lighthizer, who went on to become USTR, and Stephen Vaughn, who became USTR general counsel.

Commerce commandos: Geovette Washington, a former general counsel at OMB, will lead the transition team at Commerce, where she spent three years as deputy general counsel.

That group also includes Anna Gomez, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Some individuals, like Gomez, Tucker and Venkataraman, are serving on both the Commerce and the USTR transition teams.

What about the other trade agencies?: The Commerce team will oversee transition at the Export-Import Bank, while the USTR team will handle the United States International Trade Commission and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.

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https://buildbackbetter.com/the-transition/agency-review-teams/

AGENCY REVIEW TEAMS

Meet the Biden-Harris Agency Review Teams

...

Office of the United States Trade Representative

The Office of the United States Trade Representative team will also review the United States International Trade Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency.

Name	Most Recent Employment	Source of Funding
Jason Miller, Team Lead	Self-employed	Volunteer
Kathleen Claussen	University of Miami	Volunteer
Ted Dean	Dropbox	Volunteer
Celeste Drake	Directors Guild of America	Volunteer
Michelle DuBois	Values Partnerships	Volunteer
Julie Greene	AFL-CIO	Volunteer
Elizabeth Kelley	Urban Institute	Volunteer
Riley Ohlson	Alliance for American Manufacturing	Volunteer
Patrick Schaefer	State of New Mexico	Volunteer
Daniel Sepulveda	MediaMath	Volunteer
Brad Setser	Council on Foreign Relations	Volunteer
Todd Tucker	The Roosevelt Institute	Volunteer
Arun Venkataraman	Visa, Inc.	Volunteer
Mark Wu	Harvard Law School	Volunteer
Ryan Zamarripa	Center for American Progress	Volunteer

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https://www.ft.com/content/d2c811f2-94d0-4dda-b3e7-7057ee783faa <https://www.ft.com/content/d2c811f2-94d0-4dda-b3e7-7057ee783faa>
Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826

What next for US trade policy?
Joe Biden faces tricky decision over who to pick for key role of trade representative
By Aime Williams

11/11/2020

Hello from Washington, where after a prolonged and exhausting election (should we expect anything else from 2020 by now?) Donald Trump still refuses to concede to Joe Biden.

Ahead of the election, there was a lot of fear and anxiety over the possibility that a narrow Biden win in electoral college terms would give Trump more leeway to challenge the result as fraudulent. So far, the president’s court cases challenging the legitimacy of votes in certain states have not been successful. But that did not stop secretary of state Mike Pompeo, when asked about how the state department and intelligence communities were preparing for a transition, replying that he expected “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”. 

While all of this Washington drama plays out, we have busied ourselves here at Trade Secrets by looking ahead to what the next four years of US trade policy might hold — the subject of our main piece. Our person in the news is Jason Miller (not the Trump aide), who has just been announced as the lead person on trade for the Biden transition team, while our chart of the day looks at how regulatory scrutiny of China’s dominant financial tech groups has hit shares.

USTR is a tough job — who could take the reins?
And so we have it — a win for Joe Biden. The transition team is now in full swing, whether Donald Trump likes it or not, and we here at Trade Secrets are wondering — what next for US trade policy?

If you haven’t read it already, it’s worth starting by reading my colleague Alan Beattie’s Monday note, in which he reiterates: Biden won’t return to the globalism of Bill Clinton, but he will depart from the unpredictability of Donald Trump. And the first test will be dealing with the immediate crisis at the World Trade Organization. 

But before he even does that, he will need to decide who his trade frontman is. Trump’s trade tsar, Robert Lighthizer, has been a distinctive character and will probably be remembered long after he’s left office, for better or for worse. And as an aside, it will be worth watching his parting shots. Some Democrats are nervous about what he will want to do over the next two months, fearing he will set fire to diplomatic relations with Europe, and generally act according to principle unconstrained by practicality (ie, he can afford to annoy people and not have to deal with the fallout).

The early signs are that Lighthizer will not do that. On Monday, the EU slapped tariffs on US imports, including sugarcane molasses from Georgia and more US liquors and spirits, after being given the right to do so by the WTO. Lighthizer had threatened to counter with more tariffs, but on Monday evening the US trade representative did not respond with fire and fury (or with tariffs). His office signalled only “disappointment”. Pulling that punch is perhaps an early sign that Lighthizer will go easy for the next couple of months.

Democrats are now wondering aloud if the most important quality in a new trade representative might be the ability to pull off a good old-fashioned apology tour, with Brussels as the first stop. For that, the USTR need not have deep trade expertise, but be someone who could ameliorate, charm and reset the tone. USTRs haven’t always had to know much about trade — sometimes diplomats are appointed for the first few years, to be replaced by a more technocratic trade policy expert in the second term. 

The counterargument is that many important trading issues remain to be tackled, even if they aren’t the Biden administration’s top priority. For example, with the US and Europe working together, global trading rules can be reformed to help counter China’s practices.

Then there is the domestic political situation. There has been much talk about a big split on trade between progressives and moderates in the Democratic party. But this gap is smaller now than ever before.

The split was clearly seen in the Democratic primaries earlier this year, with differences between Biden and Bernie Sanders. The progressives, represented by Sanders, are generally sceptical of trade deals and think that US workers are harmed by corporations colluding with the administration to secure easier pathways to setting up manufacturing overseas. More centrist figures have seen trade deals and globalisation as a path to a broadly more prosperous world for all.

But free trade is not fashionable in US politics now and Biden has left that camp, although degrees of difference within the Democrat party remain. Progressives will want a USTR with ties to labour unions and a certain understanding of domestic economic inequality. Others see this as largely diplomatic and want a strong hand in national security for keeping China in check.

This is a hard job, and there are quite a few names associated with it.

Jimmy Gomez, the House representative from California, is well liked and, as a former union official, has strong connections to labour unions. He’s also credited with working hard to secure provisions in the US-Mexico-Canada agreement.

Stephanie Murphy, the House representative from Florida, is another name in the mix. Also on Capitol Hill is Katherine Tai, the low-key chief trade counsel for the House ways and means committee. Respected across the board by trade-minded Democrats, Tai has worked at the USTR department before and has China expertise. 

Outside Capitol Hill, the name that comes up most frequently is that of Mike Wessel, who sits on the board of the US China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has more business-oriented credentials, including a spot on the board of tyre manufacturer Goodyear, and his own consulting firm that works closely with the steel industry.

Jennifer Hillman, the Georgetown law professor and former World Trade Organization appellate body judge, is in the mix, as is former congressman Tom Perriello. Perriello has little trade experience, but spent a term on Capitol Hill as the House representative for Virginia in Barack Obama’s administration before losing his seat. In that time, he staked out a leftwing voting record and was backed by both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren when he later ran for governor of Virginia.

Whoever takes the top job will undoubtedly face the unenviable task of continuing the “America first” agenda that Trump started on trade — while not alienating US allies.

We’ll continue watching this space.

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826
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