Buy American Requirements: A Djaghe White Paper

A Djaghe white paper on Buy American Requirements provides a comprehensive background on the U.S. requirements that impose domestic content requirements on federal procurement, as well as on state and local projects that receive federal funding. It compiles eight posts from Perspectives on Trade that treat this subject. The first post in the white paper, “Trade Implications of the Buy American Act of 1933”, looks at the Buy American Act (BAA), which applies to goods purchased by federal government agencies, with a waiver for trading partners that open their procurement to the United States under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) or free trade agreements (FTAs). It is followed by “Trade Agreements Act of 1979: Broad Authority, Narrow Application”, which examines the legislative authority for waiving the BAA. Three posts focus on the domestic content requirements that apply to state and local projects that use federal funds.

• The first of these three, “Federal Domestic Content Restrictions on State & Local Projects,” outlines the domestic content restrictions applied by the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency and the requirements of the 2009 stimulus package.

• The post, “Buy American Requirements in Federal Financial Assistance to Sub-federal Entities”, considers several approaches that the U.S. has used in trade agreements with regard to the domestic purchasing requirements attached to federal funds.

• A third in this series, “Waive Buy America for Alaskan Ferry Terminal?”, describes the use of waivers by the Federal Highway Administration in applying the domestic content requirements.

Several posts examine the impact of Buy American requirements on the U.S. pursuit of access to foreign government procurement and the reactions of its trading partners to these requirements.

• The first of these posts, Opening Foreign Procurement Markets Amid Domestic Preferences, describes the role of domestic preferences in constraining the U.S. efforts to open foreign procurement markets.

• Another post, “Buy American Restrictions, Threat to Opening Procurement?”, considers the potential effect of new Buy American restrictions on the ability of the U.S. to negotiate procurement commitments.

• The final post in the series, “WTO Members Criticize Buy American Measures”, reviews ongoing criticism of the U.S. use of Buy American requirements.

This initial white paper will be followed by others that examine a specific trade topic. Jean Heilman Grier March 15, 2016