President-elect Donald Trump is stacking his trade transition team with veterans of the U.S. steel industry's battles with China, signaling a potentially more aggressive approach to U.S. complaints of unfair Chinese subsidies for its exports and barriers to imports.
Led by Wilbur Ross, a billionaire steel investor and Trump's nominee for commerce secretary, Dan DiMicco, the former CEO of steel maker Nucor Corp. and three veteran steel trade lawyers, the team is expected to help shift the U.S. trade focus more heavily toward enforcement actions aimed at bringing down a chronic U.S. trade deficit, Washington trade experts said.
Based on their past efforts, this could include more challenges to China's trade practices through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and more U.S. government-initiated anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against a wider range of Chinese products. The latter will be argued before the U.S. International Trade Commission — a forum where the steel industry has had considerable success.