Commerce Department

In one of his usual, and recently infamous, moves of cronyism, in 2001, Bush nominated his longtime friend and the man that apparently helped wean him off the bottle, Donald Evans, to the position of Secretary of Commerce. Although Evans, who made his fortune in the oil business down in Texas, was fairly good at efficiently running the department, he resigned earlier this year and has been replaced by non-crony Carlos Gutierrez.
We don’t blame Evans for resigning. Just trying to understand the bureaucratic flow chart of agencies organized under the department made our collective heads spin. The Department of Commerce is essentially an amalgam of disparate bureaucratic agencies that deal with ‘business’ and ‘industry.’ Essentially, it is the agency most responsible for promoting American business, domestically and in the world economy. With such responsibilities, then, it was a big surprise when in 2003 the Commerce Department, as the New York Times reported, “participated in conferences and workshop that encourage American companies to put operations and jobs in China.”
As of August 2005 the U.S.’s trade deficit stood at a record seventy-seven billion dollars and growing, with about $18.5 billion alone being owed to China. The trade deficit with China has grown particularly large due to the Chinese government’s policy of pegging the Yuan to the dollar, keeping it artificially low as the dollar declined. This policy, in turn, allowed their exports to remain attractive to consumers. China’s policy contributed to the further decline of the dollar and made U.S. recovery from the recent periods of recession slower than it should have been.
As the agency that is supposed to be supporting the interests of American business, the Commerce Department should have been engaging with China about the unfair advantage she was taking over American enterprise. Instead, the department, spearheaded by Evans, was encouraging American companies to, in essence, outsource to China. Not only do such policies hurt the U.S. labor and manufacturing markets, but they also do nothing to stop the United States from falling deeper into debt. Such a policy, then, hurts the U.S. domestically on the individual level as well as the macroeconomic level. If encouraging free and fair trade were a true goal of the Department of Commerce, then eliminating China’s transgressions should be on the agenda, not positively reinforcing them through undue rewards.

-Jacalyn Boyce