Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer heaped scorn on President Trump’s plan to sign executive orders Tuesday intended to bolster “Buy American” and “Hire American” policies, arguing it was little more than empty rhetoric.
Trump has missed numerous opportunities to bolster those policies, instead bowing to big business interests, the New York Democrat said.
“The verbiage doesn’t match the reality. When the corporate special interests say we can’t do this, the interests of American workers go by the wayside,” Schumer said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday, ahead of Trump’s plan to sign the executive orders in Wisconsin.
Democrats and many of their allies in organized labor have been alarmed by Trump’s support among blue-collar workers, which helped him to win in key swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania in the election. They have since sought to undermine that support, hence Schumer’s pushback against the executive orders.
Schumer pointed out that Trump did not require U.S. steel be used for the long-delayed Keystone XL Pipeline when he authorized the project last month. That was proof that he wasn’t sticking up for workers’ interests, the Democratic leader argued. The senator didn’t address that the pipeline project had been delayed for seven years under former President Barack Obama, who eventually rejected the project. Schumer led the effort to uphold Obama’s veto.
The first executive order Trump will sign will call on the Labor Department to more strictly monitor the H1-B visa program for high-skilled workers with the aim of finding ways to prevent the visas from being used to bring in workers at lower pay than similarly qualified domestic workers.
The second executive order would call on federal agencies to “more narrowly construe” the public interest provisions of federal contracting rules. That would involve strictly limiting the circumstances under which waivers of the rules would be given. Agencies would be told to take into account whether the contract bidders are using materials such as steel “dumped” on the U.S. by foreign countries.
The Democratic leader said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., had introduced legislation this month requiring that U.S. iron and steel be used in pipeline projects. “If the president is serious about ‘Buy American’ he should announce his support for Tammy Baldwin’s bill. That would be real,” Schumer said.
