Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act of 2025
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Rep. James, John [R-MI-10]
ID: J000307
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Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the 119th Congress. Let's dissect this farce and expose the underlying disease.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act of 2025 is a thinly veiled attempt to justify more bureaucratic meddling in the economy under the guise of "securing American leadership" and "promoting resilient supply chains." The real purpose? To create another layer of regulatory capture, empowering the Department of Commerce to dictate how industries should operate.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill establishes a Critical Supply Chain Resiliency and Crisis Response Program within the Department of Commerce, because what could possibly go wrong with more government intervention in the economy? The Assistant Secretary for Industry and Analysis will lead this new program, which will:
* Promote "stability and resilience" in critical supply chains (read: pick winners and losers) * Lead a Working Group to assess, map, and model critical supply chains (because that's not already being done by private companies) * Identify high-priority gaps and vulnerabilities in critical supply chains (code for "find excuses to regulate") * Encourage the growth of domestic manufacturing (by which they mean "subsidize favored industries")
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects will benefit from this bill:
* Large corporations with lobbying power, who'll receive favorable treatment and subsidies * Government bureaucrats, who'll gain more control over the economy * Politicians, who'll use this bill to grandstand about "supporting American jobs" while actually enriching their corporate donors
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill will:
* Stifle innovation by imposing more regulatory burdens on businesses * Create new opportunities for crony capitalism and corruption * Waste taxpayer dollars on bureaucratic programs that won't achieve their stated goals * Further erode the competitiveness of American industries, as they'll be forced to navigate an increasingly complex web of regulations
In short, this bill is a classic case of "legislative lupus" – a disease where politicians try to cure a non-existent problem with more government intervention, only to make things worse. The real diagnosis? A bad case of bureaucratic hubris and corporate cronyism.
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Rep. James, John [R-MI-10]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 808 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise failure point crashed the whole system. It should not be that way, and the next President can change it. Part of the problem is that the supply chain analogy itself causes sloppy thinking. In a chain, a link is connected only to the link ahead of it and the link behind it and not to any other links. Real-world supply chains are more like networks in which each point connects directly to countless others and is rarely more than six degrees of separation from nearly anywhere on Earth. Because market failures happen all the time, it is important to have as many connections as possible. Americans need access to more ways to adapt and reroute around failure points, especially for essential products like baby formula. Trade protectionism makes us more vulnerable, but free trade makes our fam- ilies and communities more resilient. Loosening restrictions similar to the ones that stunt the baby formula market would make it easier to navigate future crises while preventing the progressive and rent-seeking power grabs that come with every crisis, whether it is as isolated as a baby formula shortage or as expansive as a pandemic. Mutual Recognition. A simple way to reduce friction in supply networks is mutual recognition of other industrialized countries’ regulatory standards. This can be done either in a larger trade agreement or independently. For baby for- mula, this would mean allowing in brands that meet European Union standards even if they do not meet Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling require- ments. Infants’ nutritional needs do not change across borders. If a formula is deemed healthy for European babies, then it is also healthy for American babies. The reverse is equally true. Mutual recognition could help to open new markets for American producers in countless industries and give American consumers access to countless new prod- ucts on more competitive terms. For example, U.S. regulations require washing machine power cords to be at least six feet long, while the U.K. requires them to be at least two meters.69 The difference (about six inches) affects neither safety nor performance, but it does keep American-made washing machines out of an import- ant foreign market. A mutual recognition policy would circumvent the problem. Given the recent interest in increased antitrust enforcement, conservatives should embrace policies like mutual recognition that have the double benefit of increasing market competition while decreasing government’s regulatory footprint. The U.S. should enact mutual recognition agreements for a wide variety goods with the United Kingdom, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other governments with high standards comparable to our own. This would have especially large benefits for pharmaceuticals, because America’s FDA drug approval process is both slower and more expensive than those of other countries with- out being any safer. Americans would gain access to more and lower-cost medical — 809 — Trade treatments, and American pharmaceutical companies could defray development costs and innovate faster by gaining access to more markets, all while cutting prices. The Jones Act. The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920)70 requires that ships traveling between U.S. ports must be U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, and U.S.-crewed. In practice, this is an “America last” policy that has decimated the American mari- time industry.71 Because of Jones Act regulations, American-built ships cost three to four times more to build than foreign-built ships cost. As a result, the entire Jones Act fleet is down to just 92 ships, many of which are old and obsolete. In fact, Jones Act–compliant shipping is so expensive that it is often cheaper for East Coast ports to import oil from Vladimir Putin’s Russia than it is to send it up the coast from Houston or New Orleans. The national security (to say nothing of energy security) implications of reliance on Russia for oil and gas are obvious. The Jones Act’s original national security justifications are just as dubious. The act’s goal was to guarantee a sizable fleet of American ships that could be pressed into war service if needed. Aircraft carriers and other post-1920 naval innovations have made this argument obsolete. An $800 billion defense budget has plenty of room to maintain a Navy to defend American security interests around the world. The U.S. Navy would likely prefer not to use Jones Act ships anyway, because they tend to be older and in poorer condition than its own ships or similar foreign-made but domestically owned commercial ships that could also be pressed into service. As with many other industries, U.S. shipbuilding could be the envy of the world if it could operate in a free market, but the maritime lobby prefers a quiet, cozy exis- tence on the dole even as it harms American consumers and national security. The next conservative Administration should unleash American potential by unilater- ally enacting Jones Act exemptions wherever allowed, as currently happens most years during hurricane season, and working with Congress to repeal the Jones Act. Trade and Inflation. The post-COVID inflation spike may be over long before the next Administration takes office, but keeping it under control should remain a high priority. Free traders should not oversell their case by saying that liberal- ization would solve inflation. Inflation is predominantly a monetary phenomenon, not a trade phenomenon, but tariff relief can help at the margin by immediately lowering prices on tariffed goods and slightly boosting long-term growth.72 While this would not affect the money supply, which is inflation’s key variable, even roll- ing back the tariffs enacted since 2017 would likely have a positive effect on the Consumer Price Index. The easiest way to curb inflation (or to create it) is for the Federal Reserve to work the monetary side of the equation, but the real output side has a similar effect on prices. Lifting trade barriers is one way to boost output. It also has the added benefit of requiring no additional spending. At the very least, this can make the Federal Reserve’s job easier as the spending excesses of Congress and President Biden continue unabated in the coming years.
Introduction
— 663 — 21 DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE Thomas F. Gilman The Department of Commerce is charged with promoting economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness while providing the data that American businesses need to succeed. Intended to serve with clarity of purpose as the voice of business in any President’s Cabinet, the Department of Commerce has suffered from decades of regulatory capture, ideological drift, and lack of focus. One long-standing joke maintains that the department, with its lack of coherence, is a holding company for the parts of the federal government that could not be housed elsewhere. Thus, in the 1990s, calls emerged to abolish the department and either spin off, zero-out, or consolidate its functions among other entities.1 At the same time, the department has a higher profile now than perhaps ever in its history. It possesses key tools to address decades of poor decision-making in Washington and is central to any plan to reverse the precipitous economic decline sparked by the Biden Administration and to counter Communist China. Both assertions can be equally true, that the department possesses the expertise, programs, and authorities that will be crucial to the success of a conservative presidency and that its role in the federal bureaucracy would benefit from streamlining and reform. Many programs at the Department of Commerce overlap in whole or part with other governmental programs, and consolidating and streamlining these could increase both accountability and return on taxpayer investment. Any exercise in government-wide budgeting and reform should review the department with an eye toward consolidation, elimination, or privatization that examines the efficiency, effectiveness, and underlying philosophy of each individual component. Though — 664 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise not an exhaustive set of proposals, the next conservative President should con- sider whether: l The International Trade Administration (ITA) and parts of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should be streamlined and moved to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), along with the Development Finance Corporation; the U.S. Trade and Development Agency; the Export– Import Bank; and other trade-related programs spread across the federal government—as well as considering whether many of these programs should exist within the federal government; l The Economic Development Administration’s grant programs, which are among a broad set of duplicative and overlapping federal economic development grant programs, should be consolidated with other programs and/or eliminated; l The Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau, as well as the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, should be consolidated into a more manageable, focused, and efficient statistical agency; l The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should be made into a performance-based organization under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); l Alternatively, the USPTO should be consolidated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in a new U.S. Office of Patents, Trademarks, and Standards, with all non-mission-critical research functions eliminated or moved to other, more focused, federal agencies; and l The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. Almost every element of the department can be viewed through this lens, but with today’s political reality and multiple competing congressional committee jurisdictions, drastic structural change to the department is neither imminent nor likely. Thus, this chapter largely accepts the baseline of today’s department and proposes a bold, but achievable, set of proposals for an incoming conservative Administration. Whatever the imperfections of the Department of Commerce, it is blessed with many quality civil servants and strong statutory authorities that, directed properly,
Introduction
— 663 — 21 DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE Thomas F. Gilman The Department of Commerce is charged with promoting economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness while providing the data that American businesses need to succeed. Intended to serve with clarity of purpose as the voice of business in any President’s Cabinet, the Department of Commerce has suffered from decades of regulatory capture, ideological drift, and lack of focus. One long-standing joke maintains that the department, with its lack of coherence, is a holding company for the parts of the federal government that could not be housed elsewhere. Thus, in the 1990s, calls emerged to abolish the department and either spin off, zero-out, or consolidate its functions among other entities.1 At the same time, the department has a higher profile now than perhaps ever in its history. It possesses key tools to address decades of poor decision-making in Washington and is central to any plan to reverse the precipitous economic decline sparked by the Biden Administration and to counter Communist China. Both assertions can be equally true, that the department possesses the expertise, programs, and authorities that will be crucial to the success of a conservative presidency and that its role in the federal bureaucracy would benefit from streamlining and reform. Many programs at the Department of Commerce overlap in whole or part with other governmental programs, and consolidating and streamlining these could increase both accountability and return on taxpayer investment. Any exercise in government-wide budgeting and reform should review the department with an eye toward consolidation, elimination, or privatization that examines the efficiency, effectiveness, and underlying philosophy of each individual component. Though
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.