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**JANUARY 26, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Bringing It All (Well, Some of It) Back Home

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.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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