Team Biden’s economic reformers deserve another four years – no matter who wins

A dogged group within the administration has built support for a manufacturing revival in the US – and won support from the populist right.

By Sohrab Ahmari

Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

President Joe Biden faces a 54 per cent disapproval rating, with three in four Americans telling pollsters they believe the country is on the wrong track. The overwhelming impression is of an ageing commander-in-chief enfeebled by inflation and immigration at home and endless proxy wars abroad. Yet historians decades from now might render a gentler judgement on his presidency, even deeming it a partial success.

If such a reassessment comes to pass, it will have been thanks to a small but dogged group of economic reformers inside the Biden administration. These men and women can be credited with bringing about a new policy consensus around manufacturing revival and more resilient supply chains; robust anti-monopoly enforcement; and the protection of some of the weakest workers and consumers against corporate power.

Four figures in particular – trade representative Katherine Tai, the anti-trust crusaders Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, and consumer-protection czar Rohit Chopra – have earned laurels for their work on these issues. And they deserve to keep their current jobs, even if Democrats lose the White House. While they would never describe themselves as Maga, all four have fans among the populist right.

Start with Tai, the trade rep. Though she shuns the “protectionist” label, the Taiwanese-American lawyer more than any other Democratic official embodies the surprising continuity between Bidenism and Maga when it comes to trade. Like the Trumpians, Tai believes that mindless trade liberalisation strengthened China, decimated US manufacturing capacity, and burned a swathe of social destruction across the industrial heartland.

“We have shunted workers to the side,” Tai told the American website Vox in June, “and we need a domestic and international economic policy that champions the interests of our people.” For Tai, championing the American interest has meant maintaining the Trump administration’s tariffs and even imposing new ones targeting electric vehicles and their batteries and components.

Along the way, she has consistently shrugged off the line that tariffs amount to a “tax” on consumption. The costs to consumers are overstated, she insists, and firms don’t have to pass them on. Besides, government should put at least as much emphasis on Americans’ lives as workers and producers as it does on their consumption patterns: all the cheap flatscreens in the world, after all, won’t make up for the loss of stable manufacturing jobs and the factories and union halls that once anchored working-class communities.

American manufacturers have taken notice. “Katherine Tai stands out as the finest Democratic US trade representative in history,” Michael Stumo, the CEO of the bipartisan Coalition for a Prosperous America, which represents domestic producers, told me. While neoliberals “pushed their outdated ‘free-trade’ dogma, Tai defended and advanced the new bipartisan trade, tariff and industrial-policy consensus.”

Then there are Khan and Kanter, who, from their respective perches at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice, have single-handedly revived the American anti-trust movement after decades of sclerosis. Wariness of monopoly power has long been part of the American liberal tradition, and was a cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal. But beginning in the 1970s, pro-business jurists promoted, and both parties adopted, the view that monopolies are OK as long as consumers aren’t harmed. Market-power abuses – meted out to workers, farmers, local communities and, yes, consumers – became rampant.

Enter Khan, the Biden-appointed FTC chairwoman. Under her energetic leadership, the once-moribund commission banned firms from slapping “Made in America” labels on foreign-produced goods; went after pesticide giants that had long raised the ire of the agriculture sector; targeted the parasitic pharmacy-benefit-management industry that squeezes fees and rebates out of the drug market; and banned so-called non-compete agreements that allow employers to quash workers’ bargaining power by preventing them from seeking jobs at other companies or starting their own, among many other steps.

Her moves have raised criticism from Wall Street and The Wall Street Journal, but endeared Khan to progressive activists and populist conservatives alike, some of whom have taken to calling themselves “Khan-servatives”. Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor who previously served as a special adviser for economic justice in the New York attorney general’s office, hailed Khan for taking a “see-no-evil agency and transforming it into an effective, powerful agency spearheading the fight against big corporate lawbreaking”. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has praised Khan for eschewing “woke stuff” and instead focusing on Big Tech domination.

Meanwhile, Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the anti-trust division at the Department of Justice, is best known for his successful prosecution of a monumental anti-trust case against Google, over the tech giant’s positioning of itself on both sides of many ad markets and thwarting ad-tech competitors. The lawsuit was notably launched by Kanter’s predecessors under the Trump administration – another reminder of the deep and under-appreciated continuity between the two governments.

Finally, there is Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a relatively new agency created in the wake of the Great Recession to shield ordinary Americans, particularly those on the lower social rungs, from lending and banking abuses. The list of Chopra’s accomplishments is long: proposals to regulate consumer-banking overdraft fees; to lower typical credit-card late fees to $8, from $32 currently, a measure currently held up by the bank lobby; to ban medical debt from being listed on credit reports; to tame so-called data brokers that unaccountably traffic in Americans’ private information and which potentially expose them to espionage and blackmail by foreign states.

Chopra is perhaps best known for spearheading the Biden administration’s campaign against so-called junk fees: unaccountable, often hidden ways by which all manner of corporations extract money from consumers, who lack symmetrical bargaining power or other means of fighting back. Team Biden’s attack on junk fees was ridiculed by some in the media, but as one DC insider told me, “Much of the concrete benefits of these measures are going to parts of the electorate that are pro-Trump.” Case in point: the listing of medical debt on credit reports disproportionately affects low-income Americans, particularly in the deep-red South.

So will these officials keep their jobs? The Harris campaign has only lukewarmly touted the Biden administration’s populist aspects, instead courting the Cheney clan, Goldman Sachs, and the scammy crypto industry. It’s no secret that the oligarchic wing of the Democratic Party wants Khan’s head on a platter, and the mega-donors aren’t fond of any of these figures. Would they fare better under Trump? I wish it were so, but the truth is that retaining appointees from the other party is unheard of in our hyper-partisan age, and the Trumpians are torn between populist impulses and ultra-libertarian themes favoured by the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Yass, and sundry right-wing tech-, finance- and crypto-bros.

The tendency we call post-neoliberalism seems fated to proceed by fits and starts. Still, when the history of the post-neoliberal turn is written, the names Tai, Khan, Kanter, and Chopra will feature prominently.