Project 2025's Trade Chapter: Countering China with National Security Rhetoric, Not Worker-Centered Trade

Project 2025's trade chapter reads as a Cold War-style blueprint that weaponizes national security fears without addressing the core failures of US trade policy for working people. While it correctly challenges Ricardian free-trade orthodoxy and acknowledges that trade deficits matter, its remedies are blunt and selective. The proposals to reduce Chinese supply-chain dependence for medicines, chips, and military components, and to sanction US companies like Apple for facilitating surveillance, sound tough but ignore that real supply-chain resilience requires enforceable labor and environmental standards at home and abroad, not just decoupling. As of now, most of these measures have not been enacted; the administration has not yet issued executive orders on supply-chain reduction, sanctions, or visa cuts, but the 2026 USMCA review—scheduled to begin July 1, 2026—is in preparation phase and could either entrench or challenge the race-to-the-bottom dynamics the chapter only gestures at.

The chapter's call to close all Confucius Institutes is already partially realized, driven by a 2019 NDAA provision banning Department of Defense funding to host universities and a March 2021 Senate vote to deny Department of Education funding, along with state-level bans. This track record shows the administration can act unilaterally when it chooses, yet it has not paired such moves with a constructive trade agenda that lifts labor standards or penalizes exploitation in global supply chains. The missing piece is a commitment to enforceable labor and environmental chapters in trade deals—like a beefed-up USMCA that closes the 20% Chinese-content loophole in Mexican exports and empowers rapid-response mechanisms. Instead, the chapter doubles down on a punitive, unilateralist approach that risks alienating allies and missing the 2026 review's potential to write real worker protections into North American trade law.

The fight now is to ensure that the 2026 USMCA review becomes a vehicle for enforceable labor and environmental standards, not a rubber stamp for corporate interests. Civil society groups and labor unions have explicitly said the deal should not be extended as-is for another 16-year term. The administration should use the review to eliminate tariff-line-shift rules that allow Chinese content to flow through Mexico duty-free, strengthen the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism with real penalties, and mandate supply-chain transparency for forced labor. Meanwhile, the anti-China provisions on visas and Confucius Institutes, while popular with some, risk cutting off academic collaboration that is vital for innovation and diplomatic ties—and do nothing to raise wages or protect the environment for US workers. A fair trade agenda would pair strategic economic security measures with domestic industrial policy that invests in good jobs, not just platitudes about countering China.