Did you see that steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs canceled plans to reopen a transformer plant in West Virginia? You may have missed it in the stream of headlines covering the company’s 1,200 layoffs in Minnesota and Michigan, and another 950 planned in Illinois and Pennsylvania later this year.
In a rational world, the federal government would try to figure out why a giant in such a critical industry would struggle to keep its doors open. But in Joe Biden’s world, Cleveland-Cliffs was the perfect place to spend $575 million taxpayer dollars on “green energy” grants just a few weeks before the 2024 election. And the Biden administration wasn’t satisfied with propping up Cleveland-Cliffs and advancing the Green New Deal agenda with your tax dollars. It was also blocking Nippon’s potential purchase, which, according to a lawsuit filed by Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel, was illegal coordination.
Perhaps that’s because Cleveland-Cliffs has a competing bid to acquire U.S. Steel for under half of Nippon’s total investment. But given Cleveland-Cliffs’ recent closures, is that a track record that would be the best outcome for steelworkers and their communities? These are the same unions whose members often voted for Trump but whose leadership refused to endorse him or backed Biden or Kamala Harris instead.
Maybe Biden just wanted to fulfill Ronald Reagan’s maxim that when something stops moving, liberals want to subsidize it.
Thankfully, the Trump administration appears eager to cancel these bad investments of taxpayer dollars. The Cleveland-Cliffs grant would have created only 100 permanent jobs in Middletown, Ohio, and done nothing to prevent the company from cutting thousands of jobs elsewhere – which is exactly what it’s doing now.
The American steel industry doesn’t need another ill-formed, badly executed bailout. We saw how that worked out with the automobile and banking industries – decades of bad business practices were covered by a trillion dollars in Main Street’s savings accounts. We saw it again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when billions in Paycheck Protection Program dollars were handed out to scammers and crooks faster than Biden could sniff a teenager. That’s why Trump should go even further than cutting the Left’s climate agenda, and continue to thoroughly invest in building an economy where American industry creates better jobs for more people.
And the fastest way he can do that is by using his presidential signature to allow Nippon Steel to buy U.S. Steel, securing 22,000 jobs and preventing Americans from getting ripped off by Chinese steelmakers.
Nippon’s $14.1 billion bid to buy U.S. Steel would be a $641,000 investment for each of the 22,000 steel jobs it preserved. An incredible deal compared to the Biden plan that would spend $442,000 of taxpayer money for each of only 100 or so permanent jobs and 1,200 temporary ones. On top of that, Nippon has also pledged an additional $7 billion towards investments in facility upgrades in Indiana and Pennsylvania. Workers will benefit directly from $5,000 bonuses apiece as well as through the construction of a technical training facility in western Pennsylvania, and who knows how many temporary jobs will be facilitated in these locations?
While negotiations between Trump and Nippon Steel are still ongoing, it’s a great sign that Nippon has already offered to pay more and direct that investment back into even more American manufacturing jobs, expanding the economic pie and broadening the tax base instead of throwing away more than half a billion “green” energy tax dollars.
For four years, American taxpayers were taken advantage of by Biden – or whomever was running his autopen. Trump is right to stop the subsidization of Cleveland-Cliffs, forcing it to right its own ship or sink while he invites allies like Japan to invest in American jobs. It’s a classic Trump three-for-one that will outflank China, improve American manufacturing, and create the right kind of economic growth for the jobs of America’s future.
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