After four long years of constant “America First” sloganeering and a diminishment of the United States’s (U.S.) influence globally, the election of Joe Biden should help America move past an era of trade nationalism and back into one of globalization. At least this is what I, as well as others who value prosperity and economic growth, were hoping for.

The Biden Campaign showed promising signs of progress on issues of trade by promising to re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive trade deal between the U.S. and other Pacific nations that was estimated to put about

40 percent of the world’s economy on the side of the U.S

. However, he also refused to say when asked in an

interview

whether or not he would abolish Trump’s tariffs on China. These tariffs, which were an attempt to protect American workers, instead hurt workers and businesses alike by decreasing the amount of exports to China by

$13 billion

, which cost up to

245,000 American jobs

.

Although Joe Biden entered the Presidency just over a month ago, he has already taken steps to display he will most likely be less than ideal when it comes to trade policy.

President Biden signed a “Buy American” executive order less than a week into his presidency. The executive order promised to

provide a preference for the purchase or acquisition of goods, products, or materials produced in the United States, including iron, steel, and manufactured goods offered in the United States

. Biden’s order applies exclusively to purchases made by the government and makes it more difficult for

federal agencies to waive “Buy American” laws and purchase goods from overseas

.

The Biden Administration’s step to further regulate the purchase of goods by federal agencies should not have any immediate economic ramifications considering the fact that the Trump Administration also passed “Buy American” regulations that changed the definition of what could be considered an American-made good for

iron and steel products

. Trade Specialist William Reinsch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was cited by

The


Washington Post

as stating that the order would have

little immediate impact

.

While Reinsch is likely correct that this executive order’s economic impact will be small in the short run, the troubling part of this order is how it inevitably makes the federal agencies of the U.S. less efficient and more costly in the long run. This is because these agencies are incentivized to purchase American-made products, even if they are more costly or lower quality, for the sake of temporarily protecting industries that will not be able to survive producing in the U.S. in the long run due to a higher labor cost, as well as numerous other factors not excluding this new tendency of higher tariffs.

However, it is likely that President Biden will not have to shoulder the effects of this bad economic policy. On the contrary, it will make him more popular. For example, a 2020 survey found that

75 percent of the U.S. population backs “Buy American policies

”, even though this popularity does not correlate with success. Free trade is an effective national policy regardless of any tariffs or trade disparity the U.S. faces with another nation. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman stated in his magnum opus

Capitalism and Freedom

, “…our tariffs hurt us as well as other countries. We would be benefited by dispensing with our tariffs even if other countries did not. We would of course be benefited even more if they reduce theirs but our benefiting does not require that they reduce tariffs.”

There is still plenty of time for President Biden to establish a free-trade policy that would truly be “America First”. However, the actions of his administration so far have left me less than optimistic.