Biden's trade experiment is ticking people off. His trade rep is on the receiving end.

President Joe Biden wants to establish a “new economic world order” that focuses less on serving U.S. consumers — the norm for decades — and more on protecting American workers.

For his chief trade ambassador, Katherine Tai, the policy shift has been a tough sell.

When she goes to Capitol Hill, Tai is harangued by lawmakers who complain the administration’s trade agenda is unambitious and inadequate to compete globally. In her travels around the country, she hears from business owners who grouse that the administration is not opening more markets to exports. Overseas, she faces outrage from foreign officials about Biden’s efforts to goose domestic industry. Even progressive advocates, who share the administration’s skepticism of free trade, have staged protests against negotiations they fear will weaken labor and environmental standards.

The response underscores the depths of resistance that Biden and his team face as they try to abandon key tenets of globalization that presidents of both parties have embraced for decades. Tai is among the leading voices in the Biden administration contending the change is necessary to help U.S. workers, combat supply chain disruptions and counter an increasingly assertive China.

She’s under increasing pressure to sell this shift as Biden launches his reelection bid, where it’s critical he shows his trade agenda delivers for U.S. workers in the ways he has promised. The country’s economic outlook will be front of mind for voters and a top target for his Republican challenger — potentially former President Donald Trump, whose criticism of free trade helped propel him to the White House in 2016.

Biden’s trade pivot includes shunning the sprawling free trade agreements pushed by his predecessors — from Bill Clinton’s NAFTA to Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership. Instead, the administration is refusing to cut tariffs on imports and trying to craft regional agreements in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific that do not require congressional approval, as well as trade and investment partnerships with Kenya and Taiwan.

As the face of this gambit, Tai has been making the pitch to workers in Texas, Illinois and the Carolinas, to policymakers on Capitol Hill and to foreign leaders around the globe. In those meetings, Tai argues that traditional free trade agreements have largely helped corporations to chase cheap labor and expand global exports, making them wealthy at the expense of domestic workers and national security. What’s needed instead, she tells them, are new kinds of agreements focused on raising global labor and environmental standards, and making more essential goods in the U.S. or allied nations.

“If we want different outcomes, we've got to be willing to try new things,” Tai said earlier this month following a speech outlining the Biden administration’s new trade approach. “I don't know that every single one of them is going to work.”

In the crosshairs

Tai, a longtime House trade staffer who previously worked on China trade issues at USTR, was confirmed to her Cabinet post in March 2021 on a 98-0 vote in the Senate, with lawmakers praising her reputation of working across party lines to advance legislation. Her appointment generated a slew of favorable headlines, including one from this publication that declared "Everyone likes Katherine Tai."

She receives a decidedly different reception today. While there is still a deep well of personal respect and even affection for Tai, her role as a key architect and promoter of the administration’s new trade policy has made her a target of its many critics. At those congressional hearings, business meetings and global summits, Tai has been the one to defend the administration’s actions on trade and its economic vision for the future.

“This job is one that constantly puts you in the crosshairs of forces that are pulling you in different directions,” Tai said in an interview with POLITICO. “Different sectors of your economy, foreign policy versus domestic economics, Congress versus the executive. You're constantly being pulled in different directions.”

That dynamic makes it impossible to please everyone.

“We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while our competitors push ahead,” Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), chair of the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, complained to Tai at a hearing this spring. “Endless dialogues and frameworks are no substitute for trade agreements that open markets for American products.”

“Meet me with the recognition around the kind of world we're living in right now — where we are as an economy, where we are strong, where we are vulnerable,” Tai said at the same Ways and Means hearing. “Meet me on the terms that we need to do things differently.”

Tai’s policy proposals have resonated most with labor organizers and progressives who have long railed against free trade. Congressional Progressive Caucus Vice Chair Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) said in an interview that Tai “understands the progressive heart of the Democratic caucus,” and Barry Lynn, head of the anti-monopoly group Open Markets Institute, introduced Tai before her big policy address this month as a mold-breaking trade representative who has “more fans in more places almost than Taylor Swift.”

But even left-of-center activists and lawmakers have expressed reservations about some of the administration’s trade initiatives, such as a deal to facilitate critical minerals imports from Japan, which they criticized as too light on labor and environmental protections.

And there’s growing concern that ongoing negotiations over the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, Biden’s signature economic initiative in the Asia-Pacific, won’t yield an agreement that meets their expectations, either. The administration is aiming to convince the 13 other participating countries to commit to new rules on labor rights, supply chains, clean energy and more without instilling the incentives or enforcement measures found in more traditional agreements.

Whether or not Biden’s trade experiment succeeds will depend on the buy-in of those skeptics. The coming months will be a crucial test as the administration hustles to conclude negotiations over a green steel and aluminum deal with Europe by October and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework by November.

“I’m glad Ambassador Tai and her team are thinking outside the box,” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said at a hearing in March. “But what’s needed here are real answers on how her proposals will work in practice.”

Rebuilding trust in trade

The roots of Biden’s trade strategy can be traced to the 2016 presidential election.

Trump used decades of trade policy, crafted in large part by Republicans, to pummel his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and deliver a winning message to heartland voters that free trade amounted to a giveaway of American jobs. Against that backdrop, the Biden administration appears determined not to give Trump, or whoever emerges as the GOP’s 2024 nominee, the same opportunity.

“If you want to understand my perspective: I neither believe in pure free trade nor pure protectionism,” Tai said in an interview. “It's about what we need to do for our economy, for our growth potential, for our place in the world.”

Tai has been Biden’s foremost evangelist for what she dubs “worker-centered” trade, recasting her agency’s mission with a greater focus on countering the negative effects of trade at home. She requested a first-of-its-kind report from the U.S. International Trade Commission that determined people of color and low-wage workers have been disproportionately harmed by global trade — findings she has vowed to incorporate into future policy decisions.

She has also put a greater emphasis on USTR’s role in fighting forced labor and other workers’ rights violations, garnering praise from unions in the process — including the formidable AFL-CIO, which earlier this month announced support for Biden’s reelection. Tai has courted labor groups more heavily than most others, a reflection of their deep skepticism of free trade and their significance to Biden’s political future.

“I think the notion that she has advocated is the right notion, which is you have to build trust in trade,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has worked closely with Tai on agriculture export issues, said in an interview. “You have to rebuild among folks the belief that there is indeed a benefit that the country receives in a trading relationship with other countries.”

A hard change

Capitol Hill is a different story. Congress has plenty of vocal trade defenders and lawmakers of both parties, who have been prodding Tai to return to negotiating traditional free trade agreements. The European Union, U.K. and Canada, among other U.S. allies, are forging new binding trade agreements around the globe, they note. So is China — extending its economic and political influence in the process.

“What the administration proposes as a trade negotiation and enforcement agenda is strikingly limited,” Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, told Tai at a hearing earlier this year. “We can do better and we must do better.”

Tensions with Congress have only continued to grow. Simmering frustrations over what lawmakers say has been a lack of transparency and consultation from the administration boiled over when USTR signed the critical minerals agreement with Japan without their approval.

And in May, the announcement that the U.S. had negotiated and would soon sign the first portion of a trade initiative with Taiwan compelled lawmakers to retaliate — with the House unanimously passing a bill in June that gives Congress more authority over the talks with Taipei. A similar bill is being pursued in the Senate.

“The Taiwan bill is a clear indicator of bipartisan concerns about the administration’s approach to trade,” said Smith, the House trade subcommittee chair. “Unless the administration changes course, I anticipate this will not be the last legislative action taken to assert congressional authority over trade matters.”

Companies that have felt slighted under the Biden administration’s new trade policy are also pushing back.

In a letter to Tai and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in late May, a coalition of business and agriculture groups wrote that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework talks “risk not only failing to deliver meaningful strategic and commercial outcomes but also endangering U.S. trade and economic interests in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.” Many of those same groups have been pushing the administration to pursue more comprehensive trade deals with the U.K., Kenya and others.

“Ambassador Tai has been approachable and open to discussions on tough issues,” said Myron Brilliant, who retired earlier this year as the long-time head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s international division. “But it’s fair to say that many in the business community are eager for more tangible progress.”

Key foreign trade partners have their doubts about the policy shift as well. Longtime allies like Australia, Canada and Japan want the U.S. to eventually return to traditional free trade agreements, and emerging partners like Malaysia and the Philippines question whether Biden’s efforts to boost U.S. workers will come at the expense of their own.

”When we talk about strengthening middle-class workers in the United States, we also have to bear in mind we must do this concurrently — we must build a strong middle class in Southeast Asia,” Liew Chin Tong, Malaysia’s deputy trade minister, said in an interview.

Tai has remained resolute in the face of the criticism.

“Look, change is hard. Change is really hard,” Tai said at the event earlier this month. “There's a sort of comfort to hanging on to the old structures and the old ways because they're comfortable, but complacency really isn't an option.”

“There's so much that's just changing around us, whether we want it to or not,” she continued. “The challenge for us is, how do we keep pace with the change?”

Part of an occasional POLITICO series: The Changing Landscape of Global Trade