Ambassador Katherine Tai served as the 19th United States Trade Representative (USTR) from 2021 to 2025. As a member of the Biden administration, Tai was the principal trade advisor, negotiator, and spokesperson on U.S. trade policy. The Harvard Political Review sat down with Tai about the legacy of trade policy and identity in America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: What accomplishments are you most proud of as the USTR under President Biden, and where do you wish you could have gone and pushed further?
Katherine Tai: I wish that we had had more time, that is in part because of re-election, but also about how short four years can be. Having had my own experience in the Biden administration, the first two years were even harder than normal because of COVID-19. We began in a world and in an America that was not normal; everything was harder. You know what they say about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; they said they’re both great dancers, but you have to keep in mind that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels.
I felt those first two years for the Biden administration were kind of like the Ginger Rogers first two years of a term. Not only were you trying to gel as a team and get your feet under you in learning your jobs and implementing an agenda, but you were doing it backward and in high heels, because you were having to accommodate a global public health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time.
I wish we’d had more normal times, because by the third year, I felt like we were really hitting our stride. In the fourth year, I knew what I wanted to do to further execute a vision of a trade policy that would work for those Americans who felt like they had been really betrayed by American trade policy. Those would be our workers, who sometimes symbolically incorporated into trade policy formation, but never saw their hopes, their dreams, or their frustrations reflected in that trade policy.
HPR: You’ve touched on how it took you time to figure out your stride during the Biden administration. Do you think that the current administration has found its stride with its trade policies? What do you think these current trade policies mean for America? Are there alternative visions that are possible?
KT: One way of looking at the election of 2024 was a choice between two second terms. First terms are hard, and it takes even a normal first term a couple of years to figure out how to function as a team. The 2024 election was in some ways a battle of two competing second terms, and here we are with the second term of the Trump administration. For trade, it’s been interesting because a lot of my colleagues have seen their work during the Biden administration completely reversed or dismantled. I’m not going to say that some of my work hasn’t been paused or taken down, but there’s more of a through line from Biden back to Trump in the Trade Representative’s Office than is being reported.
I really give my successor credit for this. In the first Trump administration, one of the biggest initiatives on trade, separate from the tariffs, was the renegotiation of NAFTA and the creation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. That came into being, and it required congressional ratification, through a partnership and renegotiation between the first Trump administration and congressional Democrats. As part of that renegotiation, we together created an enforcement mechanism that’s specific to workers and worker power. The USMCA, unlike any other trade agreement the United States, has a mechanism in it that is designed to empower workers in Mexico, and in turn, to empower workers in the United States, because they have to compete with workers in Mexico. The Biden administration felt a great sense of responsibility to use that mechanism and to find out whether it can work. It turns out it does work. It could work better, and we also discovered areas where it will need to be revamped and rethought, redesigned. The Biden administration invoked it 30 times, and we concluded about two dozen cases that resulted in wrongfully terminated workers being hired back. Workers who had been without a pay raise for decades were getting their first pay raise ever. Workers were getting a new vote for a new union that actually represents their views. A new collective bargaining agreement that they’ve actually seen and approved. Back pay.
It might be a drop in the bucket in the macro sense, but it is absolutely revolutionary when it comes to trade practice in America and worldwide. We call it the rapid response mechanism. The current administration and the current trade representative have continued our practice of using that mechanism. The cases that I started are concluding successfully. Cases that I saw coming in the pipeline, I see them starting because they have continued to work on those cases and launch them. I think that that’s quite remarkable, but nobody’s reporting on it.
I will say that, separate from that, one of my great concerns is even with a really worker-centered disposition at the Trade Representative’s Office, with the rest of the administration seeming to wage war on workers in America and around the world, I am worried about how effective this innovation in trade policy can remain.
HPR: How do the American people ensure that diversity continues and progress is made in a time where it seems that the country is continually rolling back DEI initiatives? Does this symbolize a greater problem within American culture and life that we need to address fundamentally, or is this subject just a focus of the current administration?
KT: One challenge for many of us Americans who know that we are American, but who still struggle with being immediately recognized as American, belonging to America, and being othered still today, is the sense that diversity is about putting unqualified people in positions that they have no business being in. For a lot of us, we feel invisible, and it is a struggle to be seen. I think part of what’s going on right now is a backlash, that folks who have felt very established in the mainstream suddenly feel that there’s less room in here.
I think the question of diversity has to be holistic. At USTR, this didn’t get a lot of attention, but in my first year, I asked a sister agency, the U.S. International Trade Commission, to run a study to look at what the distributional effects of our trade policies have been on different populations within America. Workers, rural, urban, college educated, non-college educated, men, women of color, white. We had multiple findings. First, we don’t have a lot of granular data that gives us a very good picture of the effects, but given the data that we do have and making reasonable assumptions, what we see is that American trade policies have helped some populations, have not helped others, and have harmed others. Overall, we wanted to make sure that we made our trade policies better for as many Americans as possible. That meant looking at who had been least helped and most harmed by the way US trade policies have been conducted and implemented.
Those included communities of color, those included women, but it also broadly included the non-college-educated. When you look at it that way, we absolutely were focused on non-college-educated white men. In the post-industrial Midwest, they were part of the fabric of America and wanted to make sure they were dealt a better hand by our trade policies. Was that a DEI policy? In a way, yes, because we were trying to level the playing field. It was a bit non-traditional to think about who’s been left out of trade policies, and to include in that mix people who are white, people who are men, but I think that you have to have that kind of holistic view of what diversity, equity, and inclusion are meant to accomplish. It is meant to achieve a fair society.
We could spend a lot of time trying to define that fairness, and I think that it might be important, but it’s also very fraught. For every human being, fairness is the kind of thing that you sense when it’s there, and you also sense when it’s not there. This struggle that we are having around DEI programs right now is fundamentally about fairness, and maybe a way to recenter that conversation is just to go back to our gut instincts. Whether or not something is fair, maybe the answer should be obvious.
HPR: Does your choice to accept this fellowship at the Institute of Politics mark a shift in your career towards teaching or education, or are you hoping to return back to working in trade and government after?
KT: Even what I’m doing here is going to be all about trade; that’s my calling card, I love teaching in this sense. I love being around people who love to learn because I love to learn. I did teach English back in the day, right after college. Accepting this fellowship was accepting this enormous gift of being able to come here to be a part of this learning community. What this means for what I’m going to do going forward is a great question; I don’t know yet.
HPR: What is one thing you wish more people asked you about? I know a lot of people ask you about the USTR. But is there something else that you would like to talk about, something that you think that you have to share, that maybe we don’t ask enough about?
KT: The other great gift is getting to know my fellow fellows as human beings, and as people with whom I’m having a great time getting to know. The thing that I wish we all had a chance to do more when we were in our jobs was to be known as human beings, and that behind every title and fancy office, or within every title and fancy office, is a human being. In my opinion, that gets lost quite often, and getting a chance to re-engage with people that I might have encountered in my previous life in our different roles, with very prescribed rules, but now in a much more relaxed human-to-human colleague atmosphere. It brings me tremendous joy.
