 peaks in Ohio learning about the local economy. And while Salman Ahmed and Jake Sullivan will be the first to admit that their decision to visit Ohio in cold icy February was spectacularly mistimed, all of us have benefited enormously from their efforts and from the efforts of the entire task force, a number of whose members are with us today. But working together, Republicans and Democrats, strategists and economists, they've provided the foreign policy community with critical ground truce as we begin to grapple with one of the most consequential challenges facing the United States today, forging a new compact that reinforces the connection between leadership abroad and rejuvenation at home. The 2016 presidential elections, as all of you know as well as I do, made vivid the yawning gap between the aspirations of many Americans and the consensus of the foreign policy elite. But the roots of this disconnect run much deeper and go back much farther. The last four administrations have all begun their terms with a sharp focus on nation building at home and a commitment to be rigorous and disciplined about overseas commitments. Yet each successive administration has had great difficulty marrying its words with its deeds, seemingly taking on more and more global responsibility with little obvious direct benefit at home. I remember all too well how in the situation room, when we were debating increasing troop levels or other investments of a billion here or a billion there, President Obama would stop and remind us, not so gently, that many of his domestic priorities were starving for another billion here or a billion there, and that unlike the rest of us around the table, he was elected to weigh those kind of trade-offs. Of course, it's one thing to acknowledge that advancing the well-being of the middle class will require rethinking American foreign policy. It's another thing entirely to translate this sentiment into new ideas and initiatives. And that is precisely why Carnegie brought this bipartisan task force together. Our aim is not to preach the Beltway gospel to the uninitiated. Instead, we wanna listen to and work with a variety of voices from a number of states to understand what is actually driving their economic development and the impact that different foreign policy approaches might have on their economic well-being. Under the characteristically modest, imaginative, and thoughtful leadership of Salman Ahmed, and through indispensable partnership with the Ohio State University, our task force members have produced an excellent first report. By reaching out to state and local officials, regional economic developers, small business owners, and local labor leaders, some of whom are with us today, they've made vivid how shallow and caricatured the political debate on this issue has become. Over the coming months, Salman and his colleagues will build on this case study with similar efforts in Colorado and Nebraska, refine further our understanding of this challenge, and then offer our best judgment and recommendations ahead of the 2020 election season. To help us navigate this tricky terrain, I'm very pleased and honored to introduce today's distinguished panel. I can't think of a better group to help us draw out and apply lessons from places like Ohio to policymaking in Washington. As White House Chiefs of Staff, always one of the hardest jobs in public service, and it till recently at least, one of the most sought after. Josh Bolton and Dennis McDonough dealt constantly with the infinitely complicated balancing act between foreign and domestic policy. I had the extraordinary good fortune of serving with both of them, and I have enormous respect for them and for their service. I have similar respect for Susan Glasser, who will moderate the conversation. Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Susan is an elegant observer of both the complexities of American society and the rapidly changing world around us, from the harshness of Putin's Russia to the turbulence of Iraq and Afghanistan. As you can see, we've a lot of ground to cover this morning, but first, please join me in thanking Salman Ahmed, the Ohio State University, and our task force members for leading this critically important and timely endeavor, and please join me in welcoming our terrific panelists to Carnegie. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, thank you, Bill, and thank you to Carnegie for hosting us today. This is a terrific project, and I have to say, if you haven't had a chance to look at the report, it's really worthwhile, especially because I think it picks up where some of us journalists maybe have left off and dives deep into some case studies in a way that I was always looking for, this kind of work, and didn't always find it. Perhaps the 2016 election, we can look back on on hindsight, and as you said that, see this is one of the positive unintended consequences. Certainly for us in the foreign policy world, I think this is a different kind of conversation than we're having than we would have had a couple of years ago, and I'm very grateful, and here mostly because I'm interested to hear what Dennis and Josh can tell us about this moment. As you pointed out, White House Chief of Staff is one of the only jobs in some ways in our government that marries the two subjects, that you come together around the politics, the policy, the economic policy is very, very siloed from the foreign policy, but I know everybody here really wants to know the question, so we'll just start out with that and then we can jump back in, but there's a bake off for your old jobs, it's being held in a reality TV sort of fashion, and I think we're all desperately looking for whatever navigation you can provide us. John Kelly, who is leaving, except maybe he isn't leaving because there's no one to replace him, he has taken to saying that the White House Chief of Staff's role is the Chief of Staff, not the Chief of President, which is his way of essentially throwing up his hands and saying, see, it's not my job to manage the guy. I gotta ask, how true is that statement and what navigation can each of you offer us in terms of is there a scenario you could envision or a successful White House Chief of Staff in this environment? Well, I guess I just wanna go on the record here and say, I'm taking myself out of the running. It's just been dogging me all week, and I just, I thought this is one place I can just put it all to rest, so. Look, I do think that the only scenario under which Chief of Staff can be successful with the President is if the President changes his conception of the Chief of Staff's role and that I think is what John is referring to, John Kelly. So without commenting on him or Reince or anything else, I will just say that they have a particularly, they have had a particularly hard job made even harder by virtue of the President, not necessarily seeing his Chief of Staff as a partner to him, as somebody who can help manage the flow of every day, who can help take things off his agenda, make sure that they're placed on other people's agendas, and then also keep the whole enterprise focused on a long-term strategy rather than a day-to-day fight. It does seem to me that they've taken, that President Trump in particular is focused in particular on every day as a new set of opportunities, a new set of rounds in an ongoing fight, and it's then difficult to manage him and a team toward a managed outcome on that, and it's not clear to me that everybody knows every day what they're supposed to be doing. You know, it's interesting, often American presidents come of whatever party, and certainly for their first couple years in office, they define themselves in opposition to what they came. I think this might be a very unusual situation where President Trump seems to be defining his White House in opposition to how you rear the White House as opposed to the substance of it as well. Dennis is famous for this expression, process protects you. So does that mean we're unprotected? It means that it's hard to understand how decisions are made, which means it's hard to understand how the American people's interests are protected, and whether there are other interests that are given a preferential treatment or get biased access to decision making. And at the end of the day, that's what the White House promises the American people, which is a place where hard decisions get made transparently, consistent with laws and practices around ethical treatment of questions. And when the American people lose confidence that there is a process protecting their interests in that way, I think there's a major challenge to the democracy. We've seen this at different times in our history, and reforms and changes come as a result. But that's my biggest concern. So Josh, are you also taking yourself out of the running? Are you still a contender? I happen to be out of town on Sunday, when the Sunday shows were full of the turmoil about Chief of Staff and the White House now casting a broad net, so on, and I went on FaceTime home to say, goodnight to the kids, and the face that appears is my wife's looking panicked, and she said, for God's sakes, don't answer your phone. My wife is taking me out of the running. Running that I was never in, by the way. No, trust me, nobody's called, and I probably wouldn't encourage them to do it. And here's why, which is, by the way, I think Kelly's right, he may be apologizing with his phrase that I'm the Chief of Staff, not the Chief of President, but that's right, that is the job, but you can only actually be effective and serve as Chief of Staff if you have the confidence of the President. So the Chief of Staff job requires all of the most important characteristics of good public service, of which, by the way, I think Bill Burns is the gold standard. But it also requires a relationship of trust with the President, because the President has to let the Chief of Staff speak for him organize the operation and the full supporter of Dennis's axiom there, and run a good process. That's what you need a Chief of Staff for. You don't, as President Bush told me when he offered me the job, I don't need a Prime Minister. By the way, you didn't need to say that, but he did. But he said to me, as President Obama probably said to you, I do need a real Chief of Staff, and so you're in charge, I will back you up. And if you organize the staff the way you want it, you run the process the way you think it makes sense, and I will back you up and you will have my full support until you don't, and then you're not Chief of Staff anymore, but while you're Chief of Staff, you have to be able to run the operation. So I got to structure the White House the way I thought was best. I hired and fired as with the President's full support, including people with whom he was very close. And that's the kind of relationship you need to make the place run. So I hope that President Trump chooses somebody with experience and good judgment, but also someone who's experiencing good judgment that the President will trust and rely on, and that's been the challenge throughout the Trump administration. Well, I think the lead is in the audience can appreciate what I call the sort of bad boyfriend scenario here, which is that it's probably unrealistic to expect a 71-year-old man who has a very set in his ways patterns to change at this point, and if that's your view of the relationship, you're headed for trouble. But I think both of you have actually, in your answers, suggested something that gets us to the heart of our conversation today, which is how much of American policy, especially on areas of where foreign policy and trade policy meets American policy, how much is that dependent upon the President himself, as opposed to a good process or a more robust political consensus? I mean, you could argue that one of the striking aspects of the last couple of years has been the extent to which the President has defined an agenda, even one often at odds with his own government as well as members of Congress, for example. What can you tell us about how much power the person in the Oval Office has to shape a debate like the one that we're now having in the country about foreign policy and American policy? I went first last time. Okay, a lot. I mean, the White House is where all of this comes together, and by the White House, I include the Office of Management and Budget, where I also had the privilege of serving. And it really is the President and the White House who need to make that calculation and do that balancing as to where we're gonna put our focus, where we're gonna put our resources, and more importantly, it's the President who can really articulate for the public what the stakes are, why what happens outside our borders matters so substantially to what happens inside. Now, it turns out that President Trump has actually, I think, tapped into that very effectively in ways that Dennis and I probably both, in many respects, disagree with, but he has recognized that what's on the minds of a lot of Americans is, as usual, their own economic security, but that economic security has been so substantially undermined in the recent decades by what's going on outside the borders that he has successfully brought the conversation together in a way that I think is, may not be a bad thing for the country and for our politics. You mean because it's causing us to have a conversation like this? Absolutely. So, in your current role at the business roundtable, this is, pre-trade has long been an orthodoxy, really, of the modern Republican Party. One question I ask every Republican that I encounter who's had experience in Washington last few years is, do you believe that the ascendancy of President Trump and Trumpism is a fundamental rejection of that orthodoxy in the Republican Party, or is this some kind of an inter-leader kind of tempering situation? I think a lot of the people with whom I served in government have comforted themselves with thinking that this is a Trump-focused interlude. I think that's wrong. I think Trump is a symptom of what's going on in our politics rather than the cause of what's going on in our politics, and it will be with us for some time. Those of us who have been ardent supporters of an open international trading system, I learned my religion at the feet of Ambassador Carla Hills who's with us here, who served brilliantly as trade representative during Bush 41's term and successfully negotiated what used to be called NAFTA. Those of us who come from that portion of the Republican Party are a shrinking minority, and it is not a quirk or a bizarre outgrowth of a reality TV star-turned presidential candidate that both presidential candidates campaigned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and basically the one who won is the one who was able to demonstrate that he was more against it than the other one. So I think it is a, it is an important point that we have to take into account so I think it is a, hopefully not a permanent feature of our politics, but a deeply embedded one, and it's incumbent on those of us who believe in an open international trading system and organizations like this to undertake the kind of project bill that you have here to understand what's going on in the politics. And Bill, as you said, not try to preach the gospel of the Beltway to the uninitiated, but rather understand the interests of the uninitiated and try to make those consistent with an open international trading system. But I just want to press on this quickly before I bring Dennis back in. Do you believe that it's some re-examination of the ideology is what's required or that it's more of a question of reframing it or broadening the view of free trade to incorporate the views of Ohio and what it means on the gun? In other words, is this about changing the ideology of the Republican Party on free trade or is it about understanding the American constituency for it better? It's both. And I think it's about evolving the ideology more effectively to go beyond a rising tide, lifts all boats and recognize that over the course of the last few decades, a whole bunch of dinghies have been swamped. And that part of defending an open international trading system is making adjustments that make it possible for those boats to be lifted as well. And I think that's the challenge of the study that you all are undertaking and why I'm glad you're doing it this way because sticking with the silos ain't working. So, Dennis, you're great at vote counting among your other many skills. Is it possible in this kind of political environment that Josh is talking about for a rebranded NAFTA to pass on Capitol Hill for a resurrection whether under President Trump or some future president of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Obama kind of had the experience both ways. Yeah, so I'd say a couple of things. First, on Josh's point to your first question, I think it's absolutely right. And I think the president's ability to shape the public agenda is not only fundamentally quite strong, it's increasingly stronger the greater Congress demonstrates its dysfunction. So you see a migration of institutional powers, many of them grounded in the Constitution, really flowing to the presidency over the course of the last 10, 20 years. Some of that's due to 9-11 and what we've addressed and confronted in that time period, but increasingly it's a function of Congress unable, unwilling to work together on big hard questions to pass them. And that too is a really good reason for the study that the task force and Salman have taken on because there's gotta be new inputs into the machine here to get a different output on the other end and hopefully this is it. So that's one. Two is we had something very interesting on when we were negotiating when Ambassador Hill's successor, Mike Froman was negotiating the TPP. We went to get TPA, Trade Promotion Authority from Congress, which is part of the Beltway Gospel. The point is we passed that overwhelmingly with Republican votes, even though publicly available reporting at the time showed it dramatically underwater with Republican voters, we had, I think between two chambers, about 37 Democrats, even though publicly available polling of Democratic voters at the time had it well over 60% approval for President Obama getting that authority. So you could see very clearly some disconnect between the parties and their members in Washington and their voters at home. And whether that portends a big switch and orthodoxy for the parties, I doubt it, but it does bring to the fore Josh's question, which is what is it about what we've always believed since World War II that fundamentally an open trading system is in our interest. What do we miss? And how do we address that? I have my views about this isn't particularly new. When it comes to labor market interventions, for example, wage support, childcare, all sorts of different labor market interventions that governments around the world do to try to protect workers' access. United States routinely scores on the low end of economically developed countries. So the extent to which we're pushing for pretty disruptive economic system, but not investing in programs and projects to mitigate the fallout of those, I think we get the worst of all worlds. And if we follow that trajectory into this next big economic change, namely more aggressive deployment of automation and importantly of artificial intelligence, then I think our politics will be completely upside down. And so I think, again, another reason for the important study. Last point, we're just talking about this upstairs. This, the agreement formerly known as NAFTA, I say as a Minnesotan and a proud Prince fan. It seems like if there is a pathway to agreement, it's a pathway now well trodden in Washington, which is through massive crisis. The only way Washington does policymaking now, that is to say policymaking that need legislative action that needs bipartisan support. And the President knows this, which is why he threatened last week to withdraw the United States, putting us into this kind of uncharted territory. It'd be really interesting to hear what Ambassador Hill has to say about this, but this period post withdrawal, the six month down draft is unanticipated and unprecedented and would induce the kind of crisis that you could see an agreement coming out of or you could see an agreement not coming out of. And then all of a sudden the stakes are quite high. It's like a mini Brexit actually. There's no real process for figuring out if we blow up the old NAFTA without getting a new one. I think that's the question and your confidence. This goes back to the first question about process protecting you. If your confidence in the institutions and the processes to kind of pick up in a period of crisis is great, then give a shot. If you're starting to worry about the durability of the institutions, that is a very high stakes gamble. And I hope that the next chief, along with Ambassador Bolton and USTR Light High is over. No relation, by the way. There's a different, he's gone and he's gone and he's. So I hope they're mindful of that. Well, let's, let me pick up on this question of trade versus foreign policy. Because I do think that for many years we have treated trade and international economics as a really separate discipline from foreign policy. And I think one of the head snapping aspects of the Trump presidency is to merge and converge those conversations in a way that they hadn't been in the eight years of the Obama presidency in the Bush presidency. We are thinking of international relations in the world in the frame of have we entered a post-Cold War moment where counterterrorism and sort of asymmetrical threats were the things that we focused on even while the world was in economic crisis 2008 and beyond. Okay, so we've converged them at the top level of presidential rhetoric and politics. Do either of you see practical consequences to our politics? I mean, you know, this is a town where structure and process dictate a lot of things. I don't see any structural changes that are merging those conversations even though for people they don't make a distinction between our China policy on security and what it means for jobs in Ohio. So are there structural changes that are already happening as a result of President Trump's reorientation of our national conversation, number one, number two? Is this just simply the breakup of an older order without something new to replace it? I mean, anybody in the audience who's reading headlines this week says, my God, you know, Paris is burning and the UK is imploding and the United States is busy with what is busy with them. And so... I could go on. Could you repeat the question? Well, I'm giving you an out by saying you can talk about whether we've had any structural things to... Well, I'd say a couple of things. One is this is one of the really powerful parts of the study and I think we'll hear about this more but trade is but one of many challenges facing the economy in Ohio, middle class families in Ohio and Minnesota. I spent a lot of time both in 2016 and 2015, early 2016 as steel was going kind of through the floor in the iron range in Minnesota, which provides iron ore that's key to steel production in this country. So it's one piece of a much bigger, more complex puzzle. Structurally, Jim Steinberg, who was one of Bill's colleagues and one of our first deputy secretaries of state in the Obama administration, warned us of this when we were putting together the National Security Council. He said the creation of the National Economic Council in 1994, 1993, 1994 was very smart. Secretary Rubin put that together with President Clinton. He said, however, it's led to this fundamental bifurcation of the international economic question. So we tried to do two things to address that. One is we created this position that Mike Froman filled initially, which was he was deputy national security advisor who reported both to the National Economic Council Director, National Security Council Director, sat at all the same tables to try to integrate with his team, of which Christopher was a member, could then make sure that their analysis and their debating points were heard. One, two is we also had the National Economic Council Director, Jeff Sainz at the end, in principles committee in the National Security Council. The fact that that sounds as small to you as it does underscores the fact that the structural fixes are insufficient. And I'll come back one more time to China, which is, right now, you see the National Security Geopoliticians doing this kind of exercise where they're saying, this choice towards collaboration, cooperation with the Chinese was a mistake. Yes. And it's time for us to re-look that. Meanwhile, you have every major American multinational corporation with major parts of its supply chain in China. And you have American tech firms right now worried about decoupling from China because that's where all the data is, that's where a lot of new interesting data science is. And if we do fully decouple and go towards outright confrontation, they're gonna miss opportunities to grow because China's gonna beat us in artificial intelligence or they're gonna beat us somewhere else. This is a fundamental challenge for the country that I hope the president has a team that is looking at questions on tariffs, questions on WTO, questions on how you resolve these questions that they've now threatened twice in the last month on technology access in China and technology access in the United States, that there's a holistic team looking at this rather than just the National Security Council or the US Trade Representative. Because if they're looking at that in this traditional silo that's been identified, then it's a lose-lose for us. I'm gonna agree with Dennis with a factual addendum, which is that the structure you described in the White House of having a joint entity reporting both to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council, wasn't an Obama innovation. It wasn't a Bolton. It wasn't even a Bush innovation, it was a Clinton innovation. But that role of Sherpa, which Dan Price sitting in the front row here so ably filled during the Bush administration is a was for us a crucial role as it was for the Obama administration. And one of the things that I think that has gone wrong in the Trump administration is that it has not been a respected and crucial role in the way it ought to be in policy formulation. It seems like the policy has just sort of emerged much more from the president's own instincts than from a coherent process of the kind that Dennis McDonough always warns us will protect us. But I think we have to say at this point that this administration may in fact be getting something right about just what Dennis was saying about China in the sense that our siloed perspectives on China I think have led us to a dangerous complacency about the emerging role of China in the international economy. And now let me put on my not former chief of staff hat but my current hat as head of the business round table and organization of 200 CEOs of some of America's largest companies, almost all of them multinationals and almost all of them as Dennis described. Those 200 companies actually with the exception of a couple of steel companies who were in our membership those 200 companies are unanimous in vigorous opposition to most of the strategy and tactics that the Trump administration has deployed on trade in particular with the imposition of national security tariffs on steel and aluminum in some of the negotiating objectives in the new NAFTA in threatening a withdrawal from NAFTA in punishing our friends and allies for just because, because trade is upsetting. All of those things are unanimously almost opposed by the 200 members of the BRT who by the way represent I think it's $7 trillion in annual sales and employ over 15 million people here in the United States. So this is a big collection of people across all industries. But the place where they go, he has a point, is on China where our expectations of convergence of China to become more like us, to become a responsible participant in the international trading system which is what prompted the Clinton administration to negotiate their China's entry into the WTO, which is what prompted the Bush administration to push that across the finish line, those expectations of convergence have been not just disappointed but reversed over the course of the past decade. And the members of the business round table are the ones who feel that many of them are doing very well in China. They are making plenty of money. They are getting in some cases reasonable access to the Chinese market. Their supply chains are interwoven and having a supply chain that's both a NAFTA supply chain and a China supply chain makes it competitive to produce products here in the United States. So it's not a terrible news story but the combination of intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, limitations on foreign investment in China and state subsidies to targeted industries, each of those elements on its own would be a substantial problem taken together with the world's second soon to be first largest economy. They are a systemic problem and it may take the kinds of what to our view is often erratic action by the president to get Chinese attention and to get global attention to come together to address the problem. Now it's a perilous moment in the world of national security and economic policy when world's two largest economies are in a confrontation like this but better to have the confrontation now than 10 years from now when we may wish we had had it today. There's so much to unpack there. I wanna bring in our audience in just a second. So I just quickly, both of you had a particular experience in your roles that is very relevant to Washington today which is you went in the first few years of your presidency of having control over Congress as well as the White House to a situation where after a midterm election there was divided government. That is I think the earthquake whose tremors are being felt today in Washington January is gonna bring a different reality into some of these fights whether it's the rebranded NAFTA or the China conversation. What do you predict are two or three things that will happen to the Trump presidency as a result of this different power arrangement in Washington? Will it affect any of these debates or not? Well, yeah, I think it will. And there's basically daily things that'll get harder that will be obviously more investigations, more oversight. As a general matter, I think that's as sparky as that gets and as nettlesome and meddling as the overseers are. I think that ultimately leads to better policy. Frankly, I think that's a constitutional requirement I think in the main it's a good and clarifying and disciplining function that will I think ultimately help the administration although I guarantee you won't see it that way. That's an interesting, I'd love to see you present that argument to President Trump. Yeah, it sounds like arguments don't get presented to President Trump. The second thing is it does now increase the need for things to get done in a bipartisan way. So it just does open more surface area just on simple things like the annual appropriations process. So they're gonna have to get things done there and that would be a place where ideally people will having learned some lessons from 2016 about what's happening in the country will start to make some headway. The overhang on all of this of course is that since the midterm is over, the general is starting. And so while there'll be pressure on Congress to work together, there'll be pressure on the president or the president will surely see it in his interests to make sure that he's continuing to speak directly to his voters. And so that's gonna be a countervailing pressure no matter what's happening on Capitol Hill. So query whether that ends up dominating or whether Congress informed by this election they've just gone through sees it as in their interest to start getting some stuff done. So did it help President Trump possibly? That's in a way the scenario that's a possibility. You know, in 2006 when we went way into the minority in both houses, I didn't feel like that was a big help. But you know, in the present circumstance, probably not a bad thing. And I'm speaking now as a Republican, but one who's deeply concerned about the functioning of our political system, probably not a bad thing to have some evening of the hands on the levers of power. And it may even turn out to be productive for the Trump administration that things that could not be resolved with majorities in both houses but not super majorities. That's often actually the worst scenario for gridlock is one party rule, but without the supermajority that actually makes it possible to govern. That it may be possible to work out constructive legislation on things like infrastructure or data privacy or immigration in ways that would not have been possible when one party views itself as the resistance. Though I think the Trump White House is in for a world of hurt with investigations from the House, hopefully they'll be able to segment that. We've been talking about breaking down silos. Hopefully they'll be able to silo that over here as I hope the democratic leadership will be as well and try to be constructive in what may be a more productive political environment. I'd just say one last sentence on this because I think the last thing Josh said is important, not the siloing, but I guess the penultimate thing he said, which is I hear Speaker Pelosi saying things about trying to get work done in addition to making sure that they're overseeing Congress. Quite different than the things that marked Senator McConnell's tenure during the Obama administration, where he's now obviously been widely reported and widely published that he just decided it wasn't gonna do anything. And so there's no evidence that the incoming democratic majority has that view. And I think that's a good thing. By the way, it's also quite apparent where they won that their voters who elected them don't have that view. That is they don't have a view that you should just hold out and stop everything that comes your way. So there should be some pressure towards getting some stuff done. This is what passes for optimism in Washington these days. We can push them on that as an audience before we leave, but I do wanna bring in our audience. And especially we have, I think, a real opportunity to marry these two conversations. Carnegie has done a great thing today by bringing in some of the folks who helped to participate in this study to be with us from Ohio and to sort of reality test some of this Washington conversation. So I'm gonna go ahead and give the first question to one of our visitors from Ohio, Ohio, Tiffany Twigert, who I think, you know, let fire at these folks, Tiffany, come on. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity from Carnegie to quickly introduce you to my hometown, Khashogden, Ohio. Khashogden is located 75 miles northeast of Columbus and it does sit directly between Columbus and Pittsburgh. This report does an excellent job of describing our past struggles regarding the loss of industry in Khashogden, Ohio. I believe that too many times though, it's difficult to see past the writing on the paper and truly look at the human impact that some of these decisions have. I could easily detail the thousands of jobs that have been lost to foreign locations as personally we've experienced that with my father and my husband. However, I do believe it's more beneficial at this time to describe the absolute strength and resiliency that my community has had due to these struggles, thus making us the strongest of manufacturing workforce. Due to the loss of one of our largest water consumers in Khashogden, they were a corrugated paper company. Our residents experienced a 34% in increase on their water bills. Of course, this is all the while suffering from job loss and the increased cost of essential goods. These companies are permitted to then pull out of our communities, leaving communities like ours with brownfield sites that we are left to clean up. And we're already strapped communities due to this loss. One would think that it would be easy enough to locate grant opportunities to redevelop those brownfields. However, local match dollars are always a requirement. We have been advised that if we have an end user for those sites, then we're much more competitive in that grant process. Thus that kind of brings forth the chicken and the egg theory as we would have an end user there if the site was shovel ready. I would prefer to highlight our current successes despite the struggle and certainly our hopes for future growth. As we put our best foot forward in Khashogden to redevelop those sites in an effort to attract new business opportunities with gainful employment, we would ask you to truly consider the best way to assist these communities in an actual rebound by looking to provide funding for communities that are hit by those former trade policies in the form of site redevelopment dollars even for speculative projects, as well as complete projects that were once started and stalled by the certainly like the Columbus to Pittsburgh corridor. With that situation, only 30% of the infrastructure needs to be completed to provide a continuous 160 mile four lane highway directly from Columbus to Pittsburgh. The timing of the support is essential to a six county region and would certainly assist in the continued progression of the oil and gas boom, particularly with the downstream operations with the ethane cracker plants that are under construction in Pennsylvania and the proposed one in Ohio. With the completion of the Columbus to Pittsburgh corridor, a truly critical piece of infrastructure for the entire region, we would expect increased traffic that would provide support to additional business locations and subsequent job creation in that corridor. We have a proven track record of growing companies within our communities and we provide an outstanding return on investment as the next seven in the last seven years, 5 billion in private investment in a six county region has resulted in more than 9,500 jobs. We've done it before and I'm confident that we'll do it again. But what advice can you give communities like ours that have experienced these tremendous losses and we're working hard to rebound, especially as we go after funding that would help with projects like these, but also keep our communities positive. That's a tough order. Look, I think Josh mentioned three things that might be able to get done in this Congress, immigration, data privacy, privacy and data privacy and then infrastructure. And I do think that the infrastructure, the statistics around infrastructure investment in the United States are really astounding. And so it does seem to me that one space where your lay down intersects with a stated common interest of the White House and of Republicans and Democrats is a new infrastructure bill. And that would be the place to address some of these questions like the local match requirements. That's one. Two is continuing to argue, as I think the paper does for a broad take on the challenges facing even a community like Keshark and that has been so profoundly impacted by trade and the international economic system. Nevertheless, there are many other manifestations of potential opportunities rather than just either bringing back industries that have left or some other trade related argument. And then the third is how to keep communities positive and optimistic. I don't know, I guess my answer to that is I hope they're seeing more and more of you because that sounded like a very optimistic case to me. And that's what I'm struck by too kind of all around the country. This is what we've got, right? And it's done us pretty well. The people of this country have done us pretty well now for 240-some-odd years. And there is a big debate right now in the international system about whether the West maybe is kind of run its game. Paris is in flames, Brexit, you know, Susan referenced it. Meanwhile, the Chinese feel pretty good, right? They're making the case that, well, you know, we don't have a Congress that we have to worry about. We make decisions, we get it done. I don't understand the crisis of confidence generally in the West. I think we've seen periods like this. 1968 in Europe looked a lot worse than the Yellow Jackets today, right? Even the debates in the 1980s about nuclear deployments. That's because there is a fundamental, this is kind of out of vogue to make this argument, but there's a fundamental strength in an open democratic, transparent society that invests in its people. That doesn't actually just use its people as part of the system. And the extent to which our politics begins to reflect that again is, I think, the best course for us. So, the road that runs through it is an actual road. Can you build her road? Get your business roundtable people to build this road. First, I'm into what Dennis said. Second, when I first arrived at the business roundtable, I wondered what issues do these titans of industry care about? And so I said about asking a lot of them. I asked the staff, what's at the top of the list? And it turns out that it's not really at the top, there's an issue that's not really at the very top of anybody's public policy list, but it's always in the top three is workforce and skills training. We now have basically, I think it's now seven million unfilled jobs in the United States, we got our unemployment rate is down to 3.7%. We've got seven million unfilled jobs. We also have about seven million unemployed people. Does that tell you something that there's a mismatch going on? And then anecdotally, if you take it to each of our companies, they will all tell you that most of them have trouble finding the properly trained workers to fill the jobs that they have. They're feeling pretty good economically. They're feeling good about the US economy. Generally, let's put trade aside for a moment, which is a big headwind. But the businesses in my organization have good economic tailwinds behind them in the form of less regulatory anxiety and most importantly, a reduced corporate tax rate. And so they are ready to invest, they're ready to hire people and then they have trouble finding the people that they need. I think the most important and hopeful thing that public policy can accomplish at the federal, state, and local level is to reorient our system of skills training in this country toward educating people either at the beginning of their careers or in the middle of their careers for the jobs that we actually have available. The kinds of jobs that our new economy will produce are not necessarily the comfortable manufacturing 40-year career jobs of the last century. As hard as the Trump administration may try, that toothpaste is not gonna go back in the tube. The global economy has changed and we cannot insulate ourselves from it. But what we need to do is reorient our education system, perhaps away from four-year college degrees toward more technical training, the traditional four-year college degree, toward more technical training and do it in partnerships with government, with academia, and with the businesses who are best positioned to say, here are the skills, credentials we need. And that's something we're working hard at at the business roundtable. We've got so far 11 regions around the country where we've got a CEO leading the local community to bring together the government dollars that are available to bring in the community colleges, the local universities, and then have the business people say, here's the kind of training I need, here's the kind of degree I need, and I will take a hundred apprentices who will be on a program while they're studying of working for my business. And they'll get the skills they need. And because that is how the economy of the future is going to work, and it's not just gonna work, it's not gonna be just at the front end of your career, it's gonna be in the middle because you're gonna have to do it again because the life cycle of expertise that's required in the new economy, I think, is the timeframe is just gonna be shortening. So maybe we'll find a CEO in your region who wants to take on the partnership, but there are a lot of big corporations in this company who are looking for places to locate their facilities, where they can get the sober, well-trained, enthusiastic workforce that they wanna do in the United States because the biggest thing that's happened economically over the course of the Trump administration is the tax reform, which now makes it, which removes the penalty for doing business in the United States, which is where all 200 of our CEOs would rather do their business. Well, I think that's a great pivot point too, Dave Claiborne, who is also one of our visitors from Ohio and from Marion, Ohio, where you're working now with a university as it considers its role in the redevelopment of community, but it goes to the question, what are the jobs? I think both of you are addressing that. This report has a striking fact to me that really leapt out. The number one employer in Ohio, as it is in 21 other states around the country, is Walmart. Correct, that was a shocking. Yeah, basically half of the country. But yes, I'm from Marion, Ohio. I should say, I should preface this by saying I grew up here in the east, just a little north of here in Baltimore, so I went to Ohio for an education and remained a Royal Orioles and Crab Cake fan. So, I get back here every now and then, but it helped inform, I sort of brought that East Coast mentality to the Midwest and stayed in Ohio because I really fell in love with, and you're from Minnesota, that sort of Midwest ethic. It's a different feel. The accent was nice too. It was too. I think there's a real valuable commodity that exists in the Midwest, which is that sort of can-do-spirit workforce. I called it sort of a humbleness coupled with competence, but they won't tell you that they're competent. It's a different feel. But I think it's a valuable thing and it's valuable for our democracy. To the degree we can preserve that, not simply empty out this great swath in the middle of the country and move everybody to the coast. You're here. I think we need to preserve that. So, I'll put that pitch in. A little bit about Mary in Ohio. I went to work there as the Economic Development Director back in 97, at that point where what you were describing, Josh, the old line industries, the 40-year careers, those companies have gone away. Or we're in the process. As I got there in 97, Marion Power Shovel was the big gun in town. They employed 2,500 people, making huge equipment for mining. In fact, they made the NASA crawlers that still carry the rockets out to the launch pad down at Cape Canaveral. So they were very talented people and worked well, but that company had just, the final period on the sentence was written when I got there. The final parts warehouse moved to Milwaukee as the company was sold to a Bucyrus International when it was all moved to Milwaukee. There were other big companies, but basically half of the industrial workforce, a Marion, through that contraction, had gone away in the 80s and 90s. So I looked at my job as sort of an existential exercise. How do you save this community? What's next? After these guys have gone away, what preserves this place that has this valuable commodity, this sort of Midwest sense of community? So we created an industrial park that took advantage of some of the infrastructure that was already there. We have a lot of rail. We developed a dual rail industrial park that has access to competing rail. We got four quick companies in there and they've all expanded two or three times now. A couple of Honda suppliers, a small Japanese company, and a welded steel tube plant. And there were a number of other projects that really kind of cushioned us and refilled some of those jobs into the community. So that's the quick history of Marion, but my question is a lot of the new investment that's come has been foreign direct investment in that park that I mentioned. All four of the projects that are in there are either directly foreign. Or related to a foreign direct investment. There are two Honda suppliers, so they're relying on Honda. One of them is Japanese-owned. There's a Japanese company and now the tube mill that was LTV is now Arsala Middle out of Luxembourg. So our economy is pretty dependent on foreign investment. I guess my question is, as we try to get the attention of China and these tariffs that are coming on, the steel tariffs, et cetera, they cut both ways, even in the microcosm of Marion, Ohio. New core steel probably likes that steel tariff. They're price of their raw material, what they're selling is up. Whirlpool, who's now our biggest employer, isn't so happy about it. They make 20,000 dryers a day out of old steel that's costing them a whole lot more. And Honda's not so happy about that because their inputs are higher. So it cuts both ways. So as we try to get the attention of China and bludgeon these countries with tariffs, are we gonna mess up our foreign direct investment, which we're dependent on too? Are we, is there a balancing act? Is there some finesse that can be used to get their attention on one hand to continue the FDI on the other? Or is finesse not a word that works anymore in Washington? Yeah, well... By the way, I have never been in an event where the word finesse is a laugh line. Yeah, yeah, finesse is not Donald Trump's middle name, exactly, it's a very good question and you brought up a lot of good factors about what's going on. I love the Whirlpool example. Whirlpool is the beneficiary of trade protection from the Trump administration. They put trade restraints on imported washers and dryers which should have boosted Whirlpool's business a bit. But it's a little bit like sawing off the legs of a stool. So you saw it off part of the leg of the stool. Okay, so Whirlpool's a little better off. Then they put restraints on steel and aluminum. And so what happens, Whirlpool's costs go up. And guess who's more competitive now is imported washers and dryers. So you kind of got to saw that leg. And if you keep sawing, eventually you're sitting on the ground. You're no longer on a solid chair where you need to be. Foreign direct investment is critical in all of this to the US economy. That's part of what the toothpaste that's not going back in the tube that so many communities depend on the Toyotas and the Hondas and so on that are providing really good jobs in the community. And in many cases are among America's best exporters. Are the companies with foreign investment. So this administration has been bad at the finesse game to say the least. But it seems to me not impossible that they and or a successor administration can arrive at a place where we are restoring ourselves to the leadership role in an open international trading system while confronting the Chinese on the policies that themselves are threatening that system. And the first place to start would be take off the steel and aluminum tariffs from our friends and allies, which by the way will result in the removal of the retaliatory tariffs against whatever products we're trying to export from the Marion area. Get together with those friends and allies and put pressure on the Chinese on the problems that are really affecting the U.S. economy. I'll say one other thing here, which is that these, your communities are probably really good examples of the American spirit of competition fairness. And I think that's what's been lost in a lot of the, if you look at what people actually say and they say in focus groups and so on, it's a sense of the loss of fairness in the system that if you lose a competitive race, that's been the American way. We permit bankruptcy here and we almost celebrate bankruptcy here in some respects and in ways that other countries do not. If you lose fair and square, but there's been a loss in the sense of fairness in the system. And I think to the extent that whatever the Trump administration has started can actually be rooted much more in the rule of law and in fairness. We've got a shot at restoring U.S. leadership in the world that has been so badly undermined, number one. And number two, restoring some confidence of the American people in their government to serve their interests. Dennis, I'm gonna give you a last word. I'm afraid we've kind of run to the end of our time, but... Look, I agree with you on the Midwest, one. Two is Josh's last point, I think is an extraordinarily important one. I guess I urge the task force as you're thinking about how you look at broadening understanding for foreign policy, national security maker, policy makers about economic impacts. You also have some humility about why the system we have grew up the way it did. So we also put a lot of tariffs on steel during the course of 2016. And in fact, steel had rebounded quite profoundly by the end of 2016. But how we did it was important using the institutions that we had built up since World War II, the International Trade Commission, which is designed to look at and study tariffs and dumping and trade patterns from other countries to empower us to be able to use this fairness doctrine against our competitors and protect our own people. I think that's really important. The extent to which the president has now used the national security exemption makes it really hard to argue when we're arguing national security against Canada. Makes it very difficult for us to argue that that's based on fairness or rule of law. It starts to feel like it's based on something else. And so then when others in the system use that against us, we're weakened in our ability to rebut them. And so that's the rub, I think, is what is it about the existing system that worked and worked well? What is it about the existing system that did not work well? And we've just heard several examples of same. And then ultimately, what are the things that we could do that we chose not to or that we under-invested? Josh talked about tax policy. I have a different view on the tax bill or the tax law. But I sure think other things like, I bet you it was a lot more affordable for you to go from Baltimore to Ohio when you went in probably like the early 90s than it is today. Which means there's a lot fewer students unless there's students of means going from Baltimore to Ohio. And that's a shame. And so we have to get back to those kinds of interventions, too. I'm really glad to have been here and I'm really glad to have met you guys and have been able to read your alls' work. I'm so sorry that we've run out of time because I imagine that most of us could sit here all day and get to your place. We haven't even asked you some of the big questions. So I think we can reconvene, Bill? Yeah. We'll bring them back for another conversation because I imagine there will soon be much more to digest as the reality show turns on. But meanwhile, I wanna thank especially you for coming and giving us a real reality check to a conversation that we have here in Washington all the time. And also thank both of our Chiefs of Staff for giving us a little bit of optimism at the moment when it can seem like the world is burning. And thank our moderator who did an excellent job. Thanks. Thank you.