President-elect Trump will create a new office in the White House dedicated to overseeing industrial policy and trade, to be headed by his campaign adviser and noted China hawk Peter Navarro.
The Trump transition team announced Wednesday that it intends to select Navarro, currently a University of California Irvine economist, to run a new National Trade Council, which council will be responsible with crafting trade policies that “shrink our trade deficit, expand our growth, and help stop the exodus of jobs from our shores.”
“I read one of Peter’s books on America’s trade problems years ago and was impressed by the clarity of his arguments and thoroughness of his research,” Trump said in a statement provided by the campaign. “He has presciently documented the harms inflicted by globalism on American workers, and laid out a path forward to restore our middle class. He will fulfill an essential role in my administration as a trade advisor.”
The transition said the new council would coordinate with existing White House councils to prioritize the health of U.S. manufacturing. It will also “lead the Buy America, Hire America program to ensure the President-elect’s promise is fulfilled in government procurement and projects ranging from infrastructure to national defense,” the transition team announced.
The new role will likely raise questions about how Navarro will interact with Trump’s U.S. Trade Representative, who has not yet been named. The USTR is in charge of trade negotiations and the enforcement of trade agreements.
The decision to place Navarro in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building is a sign that the new administration aims to follow through on the tough trade policies with China that Trump sketched out in the election. Navarro, who helped the president-elect formulate his platform as a campaign adviser, is a prolific critic of U.S. trade practices with China.
Navarro has written three books in the past decade critical of Chinese economic, trade and labor practices and has directed a documentary on the same topic.
Navarro, who holds an economics doctorate from Harvard University, provided the intellectual justification for Trump’s assertions that he could boost U.S. employment and wages while reducing the deficit by renegotiating the terms of American trade with China. In arguing that reducing the trade deficit would boost economic growth, Navarro departed from mainstream economics, drawing criticism from many free-market economists.
While recently some economists, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s David Autor, have produced research finding that trade with China has hurt some of the “losers” of trade more than previously understood, few believe that trade with a certain country is in itself harmful.
Navarro has described himself to the prominent economist writer Tyler Cowen as “a Reagan-Trump Democrat abandoned long ago by my party on the economy, trade and foreign policy.”
Previously, Navarro had expressed views closer to GOP orthodoxy. In 2010, he published a book with former George W. Bush adviser and Columbia professor Glenn Hubbard, Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity, that presented a more typically Republican economic agenda.
But Navarro has refashioned himself several times throughout his career, running for office as a Democrat several times in the 1990s and also publishing investment advice books.
