It could still be put to use in the Section 232 steel investigation.
Originally published on Medium.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s Made In America pipeline memorandum.
You’re forgiven if you missed the date; the news cycle spins on overdrive these days. But it made a lot of noise in 2017 when the memo was released — and was well-received by the domestic manufacturing sector Trump had championed on the campaign trail.
The memo to the president's Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, instructed him to:
“… develop a plan under which all new pipelines, as well as retrofitted, repaired, or expanded pipelines, inside the borders of the United States … use materials and equipment produced in the United States, to the maximum extent possible and to the extent permitted by law.”
It was a bold, encouraging first step for the brand-new president. But that plan’s due date came and went months ago, without the public seeing its details.
Presumably the president saw it. But what came of it? Would procurement policies be tightened? Would new ones be proposed? The pipeline memo’s disappearance was akin to the third child added (and quickly subtracted) to Married…With Children, or the replacement doctor on the U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With little explanation, it has vanished.
Still, we shouldn’t declare it legally dead just yet. A lot of the president’s trade policy decisions, seeded in his first year, are ripe for harvest in 2018 — and the goals outlined in that pipeline memo could be among them.