WASHINGTON (July 23, 2026) — Today, Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement in response to the Trump administration’s announcement of “Section 301” tariffs on goods from 60 U.S. trading partners, 10% for 22 partners and 12.5% for the other 38 compared to a legal “simple average” rate of 3.5%, ostensibly related to imports of products made with forced labor:
“The experience with the Trump administration’s illegal ‘international emergency’ tariffs last year suggests that its new Section 301 tariff decree, if it survives court scrutiny, will likely cost Americans $100 billion a year. Mr. Trump and his trade officials have clearly told American families to expect higher prices for groceries, back-to-school supplies, Christmas presents and other goods this fall. And it has warned American businesses grappling with the high cost of essential goods and business inputs — farmers, manufacturers, restaurants, building contractors, retail shops, clinics and others — to expect no relief.
“The administration’s decree, however, may fail in court just as last year’s IEEPA Executive Orders did. As PPI’s testimony earlier this month explained, measured either against the Constitutional separation of powers or the statutory rules of Section 301, its vague claims about forced labor abroad do not hold up. Constitutionally, it is likely impermissible as an attempt to use a law designed for problem-solving abroad to impose a general tariff increase. And legally, Section 301 requires administrations to demonstrate ‘unreasonable acts, policies, or practices’ which impose a burden on U.S. commerce, which this Executive Order fails to do. While making emotive claims about forced labor, it neither presents evidence that the listed countries are buying goods made with the use of forced labor, nor demonstrates that if they were, this would impose the statutorily required ‘burden on U.S. commerce.’
“Thus, the Executive Order looks vulnerable to challenge, and courts would have good reason to strike it down. The courts, however, should not have to make this call. Rather, Congress should act to restore Constitutional policymaking after a year of erratic, constantly changing, and basically inappropriate administration attempts to rule by decree. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) this week introduced important legislation to terminate Mr. Trump’s tariff decrees en bloc and restore a Constitutionally appropriate, Congressionally-driven system for setting tariff rates. The appropriate next step is for House Speaker Mike Johnson, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, and their Senate counterparts Majority Leader John Thune and Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo to pass this bill and restore the Constitutional order.”
Read more about Section 301 and how the Trump Administration is trying once again to circumvent Congress to implement tariffs and skyrocket costs for Americans here.
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @ppi.
“Section 301,” a trade statute drafted in 1974, authorizes presidents to use tariffs as negotiating leverage to solve specific trade policy problems, after demonstrating that the government of a relevant country is implementing unreasonable “acts, policies, or practices” that impose a “burden on U.S. commerce.”Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced that the Trump administration would use this law, along with “Section 232,” to restore the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariff rates the Supreme Court struck down that month.
Five months later, the Trump administration’s Executive Order uses Section 301 to impose tariffs of 10% on goods from 6 U.S. trading partners (Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the U.K.) and of 12.5% on goods from another 54, from Australia, New Zealand and Japan to Chile, Colombia, Mexico, China, South Africa, and Bangladesh. Together, these countries are the source of about $3.3 trillion in goods, roughly 97% of the consumer goods, groceries, industrial inputs, and raw materials American families and businesses buy from abroad. Based on the $82 billion raised by last year’s 10% “IEEPA” global tariff, imposed on April 9, 2025, and in place until the Supreme Court’s decision in February, the action is likely to cost Americans roughly $100 billion a year.
The administration’s argument for this action is a claim that (a) the countries on its list are importing goods made with the use of forced labor, and using them to produce other goods competing with American products, and (b) this imposes a “burden” on U.S. commerce by unnaturally reducing the prices of their goods. Gresser’s July 2026 testimony, given before the U.S. Trade Representative Office’s “301 Committee,” rebuts both claims, arguing that the action fails on Constitutional grounds, and also fails to meet Section 301’s evidentiary standards:
Secretary Bessent’s comment demonstrates that this action, along with the accompanying Section 301 investigation of “structural excess capacity” in manufacturing in 16 economies, is simply meant to replace the illegal IEEPA Executive Orders of 2025 and impose a general tariff increase, rather than to address a forced-labor policy question through policy reform. Section 301 does not authorize general tariff increases, as the Constitution reserves this to Congress by assigning power over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises” to Congress in Article I. The Executive Order is therefore an impermissible breach of the separation of powers.
The U.S. Trade Representative Office’s Report of June 2 recommending these tariffs fails to demonstrate that any of the countries it names are importing forced labor goods. Rather, it simply notes that there is some forced labor trade in the world, and that the listed countries must therefore be buying some. In some cases — for example, Spanish breweries’ imports of Burmese rice for malt liquor — it accuses the countries of buying goods Americans also buy. This cannot justify tariff imposition.
USTR’s Report also fails to demonstrate that, if any of the listed countries are in fact buying forced labor goods, this would impose a “burden” on U.S. commerce. It argues that “in general”, forced labor enterprises would produce goods at lower costs than honorable and law-abiding businesses. This may well be true in some cases, but as Gresser’s testimony points out, the largest recent U.S. forced-labor enterprise – “Rojas Avila Harvesting,” a labor contractor active in Georgia onion and blueberry picking, 24 of whose executives and associates have pleaded guilty to human trafficking, forced labor, and other crimes — operated for years without affecting the prices of goods. Only empirical data and analysis could demonstrate the price effects USTR assumes to be a general pattern, and its report offers none.
Outside the bounds of this particular action, the Trump administration has shown little interest in forced labor. To the contrary, it has sharply scaled back U.S. government efforts to eliminate forced labor, canceling all U.S. support for forced labor elimination overseas through DOGE last year and reducing the number of Labor Department inspectors to fight it at home.
Education officials have had high hopes for this month’s launch of the long-awaited Workforce Pell program. For the first time ever, students attending short-term vocational programs in fields like healthcare support and the skilled trades will be eligible for federal grant aid, just like their peers studying English or biology at a university — a potential “game changer” for career training, in the recent words of Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent.
Workforce Pell does indeed promise a step toward rectifying the imbalance in federal funding for college-going Americans and those who seek to join the workforce sooner. But higher education leaders might need to temper their expectations, at least early on. No matter what, it will take at least a few years for states to fully implement Workforce Pell, which requires them to decide which programs will be eligible and track their results. Design choices by the federal government, as well as the basic realities faced by short-term job training programs, may limit the program’s initial potential, too.
That’s the conclusion I’ve reached after conversations with multiple community college system leaders in recent weeks, who I offered confidentiality in order for them to speak freely.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Mississippi’s education reforms has been its durability. Unlike the policy churn familiar to education advocates in most of the country, the state has steadily built on its reform agenda for around 15 years to create a coherent and comprehensive policy framework — one that includes not only strong learning standards and rules that hold schools accountable for their results, but also evidence-based instructional practices like the science of reading and real support for implementation down to the classroom level. As I’vewritten, it was this marathon approach that helped propel us to the top of the national leader board in reading and math, when adjusting for demographics, in 2024.
What some may not realize is that our ability to keep going wasn’t simply dumb luck. It was grit. By the time Mississippi began making efforts to dramatically improve learning, the national mood had already begun to sour on ideas like accountability and rigorous standards. The bipartisan consensus for reform was pulling apart at the seams, and states across the country were already starting to turn back, or water down, measures they had enthusiastically adopted only a few years before.
From the left, longstanding complaints about standardized testing found new purchase with the public after several years of No Child Left Behind, which used grade-level scores on exams as the exclusive measure of whether schools could be designated as “in need of improvement” and face consequences. When reformers began to advocate that tests be used to evaluate teachers, their unions saw an opportunity not only to cast the effort as an attack on educators but to delegitimize all standardized testing and the broader concept of school accountability. A 2008 Time Magazine cover of the first mayorally-appointed Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee, holding a broom became emblematic not of reformers’ desire to clean up overly bureaucratic and ineffective school districts but of the teachers union’s accusation that reformers sought to fire their way to success.
On the right, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by most states in 2010, became the subject of evolving and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories online and in conservative media. Reasonable critiques — ranging from concerns the standards didn’t emphasize phonics enough in the early grades to philosophical disagreements about whether the federal government should incentivize the adoption of particular state learning standards — were completely blown away by allegations that the standards were a sinister plot to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideologies. Conservatives dubbed the standards “Obamacore,” despite the entire effort preceding Obama’s presidency and having its genesis in a wholly state-driven process, because many states had rushed their adoption to be competitive in the first round of Race to the Top, the president’s signature education grant initiative.
But they could soon rise further. Later this year, the USTR is expected to impose further country-specific duties under Section 301 investigations into “structural excess capacity” among 16 of America’s largest trading partners. The administration accuses these countries of “producing more goods than they can consume or productively invest domestically”, a definition that Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank, calls “eccentric”.
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A strange proposal from Mr. Trump last week suggests permanent U.S. Navy policing Strait of Hormuz traffic in exchange for a rakeoff:
“All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait,” [and the U.S.] “will be reimbursed, at therate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World.”
As with the July 8 “embargo on Spain” idea, this looks more like an agitated search for a Gulf achievement than anything serious. Also like that one, it seems to have swiftly disappeared. The more traditional U.S. maritime principles are (a) “freedom of navigation” on oceans and in international waterways like the Strait, as a support for U.S. commerce and common-good contribution to world prosperity, and (b) the U.S. Navy is not for foreign rent or hire. (Very traditional maritime principles, continuous from the Jefferson administration’s 1807 response to the Orders in Council, through Admiral Mahan’s Gilded Age theorizing, the Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter, to the 21st-century FONOPS; see below.) In that spirit, the present-day big picture on commercial fleets and navies:
Ships: As of January 2026, according to UNCTAD’s “Review of Maritime Transport”, 116,000 merchant ships of 100 tons or more were on the water at the beginning of 2026, together capable of carrying 2.5 billion tons of cargo at any one time. (About 150 per day were transiting the Strait of Hormuz in that pre-war month; this week it’s about ten a day.) Steaming alongside this commercial fleet are about 45,000 large fishing vessels (by the UN FAO’s count), plus 14,000 cruise ships and large yachts; a few hundred icebreakers, cable ships, and other specialized vessels; and 4,000 naval ships. A basic tally:
* “Other cargo” includes small coastal cargo ships, seagoing barges, refrigerated “reefers” carrying perishable cargoes, etc.
Fleet growth: Though government trade policies have mostly deadlocked over the last decade, the actual real-world commercial fleet has grown with startling speed. The 98,000 merchant ships of 2010 could ferry 1.28 billion tons of cargo around the oceans — half of this year’s 2.53 billion-ton capacity, with the container fleet growing from 169 million to 389 million deadweight tons and the bulk-carrier fleet from 457 million to 1.06 billion deadweight tons. Nor does this burst of growth look like it’s slowing down. Last year, 1,643 new vessels steamed out of the yards, and BRS Shipbrokers says 5,600 more are under construction this year: 4,055 in China, 731 in Korea, 633 in Japan, 320 in Europe, 306 everywhere else. (The U.S. is making 15 — not a lot, but a noticeable jump from the three a couple of years ago, after the Philly Shipyard’s 2024 purchase by Hanwha Oceans.) By 2029 or so, these new vessels will likely add another 470 million tons of cargo capacity.
Cargo: In a normal peacetime year, about $0.85 trillion worth of goods transit the Strait of Hormuz. (About $600 billion comes out in the form of oil, aluminum, fertilizer, helium, etc., and $250 billion goes in.) That would be about 3% of the $18 trillion in annual worldwide maritime goods trade. For context, this is roughly 60% of the world’s $26 trillion in goods exports, or, relative to output, about (a) 15% of the world’s $118 trillion ‘GDP’, and (b) 64% of the global $29 trillion in value-added manufacturing, agriculture, forestry, mining, and fisheries output. (Land trade and air cargo are about $6 trillion; the three transport ‘modes’ overlap a bit, so the numbers don’t sum perfectly to $26 trillion.) Here’s an evocative visualization —done in 2012, so a bit dated — of these ships as they move across oceans and through narrows.
The military arm: The world’s navies are much smaller than the commercial and fishing fleets, operating 4,000 warships with a combined tonnage of 18 million deadweight tons. The U.S. Navy’s 290 ships combine for 8.6 million DWT, or about 45% of the worldwide total. According to the U.S. Naval Institute’s fleet tracker, 18 of these ships, including two of the 11 carrier groups, are in the Persian Gulf at a cost of about $15 million a day:
Two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers with two Carrier Air Wings’ worth of fighters, strike aircraft, and helicopters (Wings 9 and 7) aboard
Twelve Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers (DDGs)
One Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser
One amphibious assault ship
One amphibious dock landing ship
One amphibious transport dock ship
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
Offer a positive alternative.
PPI’s Director of National Security Policy Danielle Steitz, a Joint Staff and House Armed Services Committee alumna, tracks U.S. military and security policy.Centcom reports on Gulf operations.
The U.S. Naval Institute’s Fleet Tracker tells you, more or less, where the Navy ships are.
The Hanwha Philly Shipyard, Hanwha Oceans’ joint-build project, hopes to revive U.S. civilian
shipbuilding.
Fishing fleets:
UN FAO tallies on the world fishing fleet – about 4.1 million vessels in total, of which 2.5 million have motors, and 45,000 are large vessels of 100 tons or more.
And the “freedom of navigation” backstory:
19th century: Thomas Jefferson’s spirited response (1807) to the U.K.’s Orders in Council during the Napoleonic Wars; Admiral Mahan argues (1890) for a powerful American fleet, as “the necessity of a navy springs from the existence of a peaceful commerce.”
20th century: The second of Wilson’s Fourteen Points (1918), on encouraging peaceful trade, starts with “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas”; the Atlantic Charter’s seventh clause (1941) states a right for all to “traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance.”
21st century: The Navy’s 21st-century “FONOPS” (“Freedom of Navigation Operations”) program asserts the right of passage in tense waters.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
WASHINGTON (July 22, 2026) — Today, Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement regarding Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) introduction of the Congressional Trade Powers Reform Act of 2026:
“Since February of 2025, the Trump administration has produced a stream of ever-changing tariff decrees, ranging from across-the-board rate increases designed to restore Depression-level tariff rates and 19th-century taxation systems, to unprovoked attacks on Canada, to bizarre claims that condensed milk and balance beams are ‘steel or aluminum derivative products.’ These have damaged the Constitutional separation of powers, raised prices for American families, imposed tens of billions of dollars in new costs each month on goods-producing American businesses from factories and farms to restaurants and construction sites, and damaged national-security relationships with America’s neighbors and core allies abroad. The American public is deeply and understandably unhappy about all of this.
“In these circumstances, we at PPI are excited and enthusiastic about Finance Committee Ranking Member Wyden’s introduction of the Congressional Trade Powers Reform Act of 2026. Though good policy at any time, it is especially timely in this summer of 2026. His bill is the right response, providing a path back to constitutionally appropriate policymaking, and actual trade policies centered on growth, lower inflation, and revived business competitiveness rather than crank theories and presidential whims.
“By repealing Sections 122 and 338 of U.S. trade law as antiquated and unnecessary, and requiring Congressional votes to approve any use of Sections 301, 232, and 201 of U.S. trade law, Sen. Wyden’s bill would restore the fundamental Constitutional principle that Congress has authority over ‘Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.’ This will ensure that presidents hoping to use tariffs for policy goals cannot impose their own rates by decree as Mr. Trump has tried to do, but must instead win the assent of Congress. This would structurally improve future policy by confining use of these laws to the occasional cases in which Congress has a consensus that tariffs are an appropriate policy tool; and more immediately provide the public relief on consumer-goods affordability and business costs by terminating Trump administration decrees which do not meet that test. It is good policy and good economics and deserves support.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
WASHINGTON (July 22, 2026) — America’s worst cost-of-living crisis in 50 years has many causes, one of which is how well the U.S. antitrust laws are enforced against harmful consolidation and business practices that drive up prices. But in recent decades, antitrust enforcement has lurched from one ideological extreme to another, sacrificing vigorous, consistent, and pragmatic enforcement that promotes competition and protects consumers, according to a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).
In “Charting a Center-Left Course For Antitrust Enforcement,” Diana Moss, Vice President and Director of Competition Policy at PPI, traces how U.S. antitrust over the last 50 years has included two major swings. One is four decades of Chicago School conservatism, which considered vigorous enforcement a drag on efficiency and innovation. Another, more recent, episode is Biden-era Anti-Monopoly progressivism, which stretched antitrust law to try to fix problems it was never built to solve.
PPI’s report is based on qualitative analysis and a deep dive into three decades of DOJ and FTC merger data. The results reveal that ideological swings in enforcement have a real impact on competition and consumers. For example, lax Chicago-School enforcement did significant damage, allowing harmful consolidation. Biden-era enforcers attempted to enjoin, or block, more mergers — especially in the digital markets — but suffered the lowest rate of wins-per-injunction across five administrations. The Obama administration had the highest rate, successfully stopping harmful consolidation in food, healthcare, and other consumer-facing markets.
“Every time antitrust swings to an ideological extreme, consumers pay for the reset,” said Moss. “Chicago School conservatism let market power run unchecked for forty years, for which U.S. consumers are still paying the price. Anti-Monopoly progressivism spent its capital on risky digital-sector fights, even as consolidation accelerated in food, healthcare, and housing — sectors where Americans acutely feel high prices. Now we’re watching the Trump administration politicize antitrust to reward allies and punish enemies. None of this serves competition and consumers.”
The report lays out a two-part platform for a center-left approach to vigorous, consistent, and pragmatic enforcement. This includes codifying principles that produced some of the most effective enforcement in the post-Chicago era under the Obama administration. The report also encourages going further with new reforms to strengthen and clarify the antitrust laws, lower burdens on plaintiffs, learn from failed remedies, and reallocate agency resources in key sectors like food, healthcare, and energy.
“The antitrust laws exist to keep markets fair and support consumers,” said Moss. “Big swings in enforcement ideology defeat this goal, and U.S. consumers pay for the inconsistency.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @ppi.
The last 50 years have been marked by major shifts in the nation’s approach to enforcing U.S. antitrust laws. For example, laissez-faire or “Chicago School” conservatism captured antitrust for almost four decades beginning in the 1970s, persuading enforcers and judges that vigorous enforcement stifled efficiency and chilled innovation. In fact, enforcement protects the very competition that spurs incentives for firms to become more efficient and innovative. Diametrically opposed is the more recent theory of “Anti-Monopoly” progressivism, defined by far left attempts to use antitrust enforcement to rectify a variety of economic, political, and social injustices. U.S. antitrust laws, however, are not designed for such purposes. Instead, they are intended to serve the broad public interest by assuring a level playing field for competition and protecting consumers through fair prices, choice and innovation. There is a suite of other policy tools that can more efficiently and effectively tackle the problems that the Anti-Monopoly movement seeks to cure with antitrust enforcement.
This PPI analysis unpacks the downsides and high opportunity costs resulting from the ideological swings that divert antitrust enforcement from a more pragmatic, consistent, and effective course. As Americans face the worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1970s, the imperative of vigorous antitrust enforcement that works in the best interests of competition and consumers has never been higher. This includes focusing on consumer-facing sectors like food, healthcare, housing, and transportation, where the abuse of market power is highly visible and is felt keenly in pocketbooks and paychecks.
The adverse effect of Chicago School conservatism on antitrust is well established. But the downsides of major features of Anti-Monopoly enforcement under the Biden administration are not. The report takes a deep dive into this question and concludes that while Anti-Monopoly enforcers did work to temporarily slow down consolidation, they also incurred high costs in pursuing a specialized agenda.
PPI’s report concludes with pragmatic proposals for a center-left antitrust platform to rein in harmful market power with discipline and consistency. These include codifying the principles advanced by “post-Chicago” enforcers, especially under the Obama administration and fortifying them with principles that clarify, update, and strengthen antitrust enforcement.
Proposals in the first category include: adopting a broad interpretation of the consumer welfare standard to include price and nonprice dimensions of competition; enforcing the “structural presumption” against illegal horizontal mergers; applying the antitrust laws to competitive problems in input, output, and innovation markets; and taking a skeptical view of efficiency justifications for anticompetitive consolidation and conduct.
The second category of proposals includes: reaffirming the central role of the consumer welfare standard in antitrust enforcement; adding a presumption against anticompetitive vertical mergers; reducing burdens on antitrust plaintiffs; raising the bar on efficiency claims; updating remedies policy based on evidence of past failures; and consolidating expertise in sectors like food, healthcare, and energy in either the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
In January 1993 Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute took a meeting with two British politicians eager to learn about how Bill Clinton had revived the American left. One of them was Gordon Brown, earnest and engaged, the other seemed very nice, although afterwards Marshall couldn’t for the life of him remember his name.
Formally, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) was the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council. Informally, it was the intellectual resource of a group known as the New Democrats, primarily southern governors and politicians who had reset their party after the Republicans had held the White House for more than a decade. Clinton had become their candidate, captured the party nomination and in 1992 won the presidency.
Shortly before Clinton achieved this victory, Labour had lost its fourth election in a row. By the time it got a chance to try again it would have been out of power for 18 years. So naturally its leading figures were keen to learn all they could about Clinton’s campaigning techniques — rapid rebuttal, a war room — but also about the policy and positioning of the New Democrats. It was the latter that had brought Brown and his friend to Marshall’s office.
If the tariffs do take effect, they will apply to most Canadian goods, including those that qualify for duty-free treatment under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump negotiated during his first term. Energy, potash fertilizer, critical minerals, fish and products covered by existing national security tariffs will be exempt, said the administration official, who briefed reporters under ground rules that did not allow them to be identified.
That would probably hit consumers with higher prices ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, exacerbating the administration’s political challenges with affordability, said Ed Gresser, vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute in D.C. and a former U.S. trade official.
“If you as a family or you as a business were hoping for some relief this fall, you’re not going to get it. Things are going to get more expensive,” Gresser said.
Before Andy Burnham takes power on Monday, he could do worse than spend a moment reflecting on what happened to Keir Starmer’s landslide victory and 17% post-election poll lead. How did Starmer end up trailing Nigel Farage and Reform UK just two years later? Why have so many working-class voters once again turned their backs on Labour?
Many had returned in 2024 after leaving the party in 2019, but now feel deeply let down. Reflecting on this is well worth Burnham’s time because Labour’s relationship with working-class supporters, once its core vote, is in peril. Yet there is no route to a parliamentary majority without them.
Of course, this is not just an electoral imperative – championing the rights of working-class voters is most progressive parties’ moral mission.
WASHINGTON (July 17, 2026) — Today, Danielle Steitz, Director of National Security Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement in response to President Donald Trump’s speech yesterday evening on election security:
“Six years ago, Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. This simple fact has become taboo to utter in the Republican Party because Donald Trump cannot and will not accept it. Trump’s address last night, where he alleged that China had interfered with the 2020 presidential election, would be laughable if the implications for American democracy were not so serious.
“The president’s claims of Chinese interference are not substantiated by any of the documents whose declassification he has directed. The intelligence community’s assessment has been clear from the start — there are no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results. The cherry-picked declassification of intelligence reports from singular, unvetted human sources with no corroboration or verification is yet another example of Trump weaponizing the vital work of American intelligence for personal gain.
“To be clear, foreign influence operations around U.S. elections remain a bipartisan concern, and there is much to be done to strengthen resilience against these efforts to exacerbate divisions in American society. If President Trump wished to confront these issues, he could reverse the drastic cuts his administration has made to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He could restore the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, and the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Office — all three organizations that were slashed or shuttered by members of his cabinet. Instead, Trump chooses grievance politics and rambling White House speeches that only weaken American trust in free and fair elections.
“The president and his administration would do well to listen to the recommendation approved by their colleague Marco Rubio in 2020: given the ‘significant national security and electoral consequences’ of allegations around the safety of elections, ‘sitting officials and candidates should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question.’ Trump’s continued crusade of unsubstantiated allegations that call democratic elections into question only serves the interests of foreign adversaries who wish to see America weakened and divided.”
Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us at @PPI.
A paycheck matters. But it’s not the only measure of a good career. A federal wage data analysis of non-college occupations argues that those pathways don’t pay off compared to college. The findings are accurate. But what do they actually tell us?
This isn’t about whether career pathway programs work or how to measure outcomes. It’s about wages, who’s being compared when non-college wages are held up against a four-year degree, and whether that comparison is as straightforward as it looks.
Community colleges have a particular stake in getting that comparison right, since they sit at the center of both the problem and the solution.
The data isn’t in dispute. Six-figure salaries for non-college jobs are the exception, not the rule. In many high-profile trades, only the top 10% or fewer of workers actually reach that threshold. And the better-paid non-college occupations are overwhelmingly male. In some cases, fewer than 10% of workers are women, with the largest, lower-paid non-college fields, like home healthcare, dominated by women. That pattern must be taken seriously.
America at 250 seems stuck in a miasma of rival populisms that offer irreconcilable visions for curing what ails our country. Yet both the MAGA right and the socialist left start from the same demoralizing premise: The system is rigged!
That is the battle cry of today’s populist ascendancy, and it has undeniable potency. It is upsetting but vague enough to be impossible to prove or disprove. It can be counted on to rile up voters while at the same time stripping them of agency.
How can ordinary working families control their destinies if “the system” — whatever that is — is controlled by a shadowy cabal of globalists or billionaires? Telling people that they’re the suckers in a rigged political game breeds cynicism and fatalism, opening the door to demagogues who promise to overthrow the riggers if given unchecked power.
This paranoia-inducing gambit certainly has worked for President Trump. But democratic socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also parrot the “rigged system” canard to ignite left-wing militancy.
Judging by today’s scorched earth partisanship and the constant turnover of governing power, however, it doesn’t seem to be working for the American people. Nonetheless, they’ve internalized their leaders’ debilitating pessimism.
FACT: America’s ‘industrial’ working class has shrunk by about a million since 2016.
THE NUMBERS: U.S. hourly-wage goods-producing employment* –
2025
9.60 million
2024
9.63 million
2016
10.56 million
2010
9.50 million
2005
11.33 million
* The BLS Current Population Survey combines manufacturing, agriculture/forestry/fisheries, and mining.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
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The core assumption of the Trump administration’s tariff decrees is a paradox: for American working-class life to improve, working-class living standards must fall. (Samples: three TVs are too many for a working family; two dolls per girl should be plenty; no price is too high for a locally-made toaster.) Put more sympathetically, the claim is that while tariffs will raise prices for families, they will offset the cost by shifting workers out of the jobs they now have into factories. But whether or not this is what hourly-wage Americans actually want, it doesn’t seem to be happening. After nine years of elevated tariffs and other “populist” or “postneoliberal” experiments, plus 18 months of Depression-level protectionism, the “working class” appears to have gotten (a) relatively smaller, (b) less concentrated in goods-production, and (c) more centered in health care. Some data –
Definitions: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Current Population Survey” says 163.5 million Americans were employed in 2025. Slightly less than half — 81.6 million, 49.9% of the total — were ‘working class’ employees earning their incomes in hourly wages or tips. The other 81.9 million worked for salaries, executive profit-sharing, professional fees, investment income, etc. Among the hourly-wage workers, just over 80% (66.3 million) held ‘services’ jobs: waiting tables, stocking grocery shelves, repairing brakes, trimming hair, cleaning halls and bathrooms, and running hospital admissions desks. Another 5.7 million worked on construction sites, and the final 9.6 million held the sort of “goods-production” jobs the administration believes will grow with higher tariffs: 8.44 million in manufacturing; 0.87 million in farm labor, forestry, and fisheries; 0.28 million in mining and energy production.
The 2025 goods-producing total, 9.6 million, isn’t much changed from BLS’s 2024 total. (Technically, down by 34,000 jobs from 9.630 million to 9.596 million.) But it’s well below the 10.6 million recorded for 2016, in the last year of the Obama administration. The overall “working-class” share of jobs was higher too, at 52.7% of that year’s 151.4 million employed Americans. A table illustrates the change over a decade:
2016
2025
Change
All employed Americans
151.44 million
163.49 million
+12.05 million
Salaried and other non-wage workers
71.56 million
81.94 million
+10.38 million
Hourly-wage workers
79.88 million
81.55 million
+1.67 million
… in health
12.00 million
13.18 million
+1.18 million
… in retail
11.15 million
11.17 million
+0.02 million
… in restaurants & other food services
7.43 million
7.32 million
-0.11 million
… in ‘other services’*
2.74 million
2.88 million
+0.06 million
… in education
1.77 million
1.96 million
+0.19 million
… in accommodation
1.12 million
0.84 million
-0.28 million
… in maid/domestic work
0.53 million
0.45 million
-0.08 million
… in construction
5.05 million
5.66 million
+0.51 million
Goods production
10.56 million
9.59 million
-0.97 million
… in manufacturing
9.31 million
8.44 million
-0.87 million
… in agriculture, forestry, & fisheries
0.85 million
0.87 million
+0.02 million
… in mining
0.40 million
0.28 million
-0.12 million
All other
29.58 million
28.50 million
-0.92 million
* “Other services” is a BLS term of art, a miscellaneous category including personal care work in hair salons and beauty parlors, repair shop jobs, dry-cleaning and laundry, funeral homes, non-profits, and others.
The pre-tariff, Obama-era trends look somewhat different. From the financial crisis low in 2010 to 2016, BLS’ count of hourly-wage goods-producing jobs rose by about a million, or from 9.50 million to 10.56 million, with most of this growth in manufacturing. On a larger scale, the goods-producing share of U.S. hourly-wage jobs rose a bit, after falling in the previous decade. Three notes on this:
Manufacturing: Hourly-wage jobs account for about two-thirds of factory employment, as against the 49.9% of total U.S. employment. This share is shrinking, though: while shedding 870,000 hourly-wage line worker jobs since 2016, manufacturers have added a net of 624,000 employees in the salaried-and-profit-sharing tier. This suggests that modern U.S. manufacturers require more education and specialized skills than their 20th-century ancestors, while robots and computers are diminishing the number of line workers.
Prices: Trump administration tariffs, at least so far, haven’t shifted any workers from service jobs to factory work. They have, though, pushed up the cost of things like TV sets, toasters, and dolls. A Harvard Business School “Price Tracker” project reports that prices of tariffed consumer goods have risen 6.8% above the pre-tariff trend, and those of similar domestic goods by 5.2%.
Policy: The past decade’s experiments — “post-neoliberal” and “national-conservative” theorizing, industrial strategies and “Buy American” regulations, tariff hikes – obviously haven’t produced a larger industrial working class. As to whether they’ve actually made it smaller, they’re very unlikely to be the whole story. Both technological change and reduced needs for lower-skilled factory and mine work, and ‘graying’ demographics and the consequent need to add health care and social assistance jobs, must be important factors.
That said, tariffs are likely part of the story. As academic economists Kadee Russ and Lydia Cox showed in 2020, analyzing the first Trump term’s steel and aluminum tariffs — 1,000 jobs saved or created in metals, 75,000 lost in metal-using manufacturing — a “sectoral” tariff increase often gives to some (at least in the short term), but usually takes from others. General tariff increases like those the Trump administration imposed by decree last year, meanwhile, act like a tax on all purchases of physical goods – cars and clothes, oranges and gasoline, semiconductor chips and copper coil, etc. That makes both producing and buying manufactured goods and farm products more expensive at home, and also makes U.S.-exported goods cost more abroad. Against that backdrop, no big surprise to see goods-producing employment in relative decline.
FURTHER READING
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
Health Care Policy Director Alix Ware examines public health trends, Medicaid cuts, and more.
Analysis:
Harvard Business School economists track the upward drift in consumer-goods prices, 2024-2026.
Russ & Cox calculate jobs gained and lost from steel and aluminum tariffs, 2018-2020.
And Federal Reserve economists conclude that “2025’s tariffs have led to statistically significant increases in prices of consumer goods more exposed to tariffs,” and that “tariff effects on prices gradually build over time, with cumulative effects seven months after implementation.”
Data:
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Current Population Survey offers lots of different statistical insights on work, hours, hourly wage vs. total employment (see Table 45), unionization, and more, with archives back to 1999. A table illustrating (a) the long-term drop in the employment shares of hourly-wage work generally, (b) the drop in the goods-producing job share, and (c) the growth in the “health and social assistance” share.
Total Employed
All hourly-wage jobs
Goods-production jobs
Health & social assistance
2025
163.5 million
49.90%
5.90%
8.10%
2016
151.4 million
52.70%
7.00%
7.90%
2010
139.1 million
52.40%
6.80%
8.00%
2005
141.7 million
53.30%
8.00%
7.10%
And BLS’ database tracks job totals, employment and unemployment rates, hiring and layoff trends, and other issues.
ABOUT ED
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
