Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have found a sliver of common ground: They don’t like the idea of a Japanese company, Nippon, buying U.S. Steel.
But now they’re running up against opposition from free trade experts, economists and local leaders in western Pennsylvania from both parties who say the party leaders are prioritizing an election year over the deal.
“These are people that are trying to put their finger in the air and weigh which way the wind is blowing, from an electoral perspective, and taking their positions,” said Sam DeMarco, an Allegheny County Council member and chair of the county GOP. “And I think that’s why you see a huge divide between folks locally who support the deal, because they understand what it means to the area, and national politicians.”
DeMarco, a vocal Trump ally in Pennsylvania, reached out to the Trump campaign last weekend, pushing for him and his team to give the deal additional review. So far, he hasn’t heard anything back.
“I may not have their titles, but I have something that they don’t seem to have, and that’s the interests of the people that are on the ground,” he said.
United Steelworkers, which includes most U.S. Steel workers, has been adamantly opposed to the deal. The union has said Nippon’s promises of protecting steel mills and employment are nonbinding, and the sale would weaken unionized labor.
Biden is reportedly poised to block the deal after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
The president is not able to reject the deal until after a final report from CFIUS is made public. He has publicly, and repeatedly, expressed opposition to the deal — most recently in a Labor Day campaign speech alongside Harris in Pittsburgh, where he said that “United States Steel, an iconic American company for more than a century, is going to remain an American company.”
A person familiar with the administration’s thinking said that Biden publicly rejecting the sale of U.S. Steel to a foreign entity in no way affects CFIUS’ impending decision.
“The president and the vice president reserve the ability to express what has been expressed multiple times over multiple administrations, that the U.S. Steel sector is strategic and is important to national security,” the official told NOTUS.
The fracas over steel in Pittsburgh reveals just how much this election has imploded traditional political divides and policy priorities. Biden, Trump, Harris, JD Vance, both Pennsylvania senators and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro are in lockstep, alongside the union, a rare alliance on multiple fronts.
Meanwhile, local political leaders, both conservative and progressive, are baffled by their national counterparts. Economists who argue in favor of open markets and the companies in question feel abandoned by both parties.
“A decent amount of the locals, people that actually have to deal with a day-to-day constituent work like the municipal leaders in the Mon Valley are definitely for the sale,” said Chardaé Jones, the progressive former mayor of Braddock and current member of the borough council.
Jones has expressed issues with U.S. Steel in the past, particularly over the company’s expansion of fracking, but said the deal with Nippon is the best choice on the table for the local community and for the environment.
A spokesperson for U.S. Steel said that “there is no scenario where U.S. Steel would be able to make these investments absent Nippon Steel,” in a statement to NOTUS.
“Many people profess to want what is best for our employees, but we know what is best, and that is why we negotiated a deal with a partner who will bring $2.7 billion of transformative investments in USW-represented facilities, keeping them in operation for decades to come,” the statement read.
Open markets advocates, like William Reinsch, the former president of the National Foreign Trade Council, are worried that if Biden moves to block the deal, it will further cement the shift toward more restricted markets between both political parties.
“It sends a signal to a lot of other potential foreign investors that the United States might not be as friendly of a place to go as they thought it was,” he said.
Sarah Bauerle Danzman, a former CFIUS policy adviser for the State Department, who is also a proponent of the sale, said she believes a decision to block this deal would likely be a one-off swerve influenced by the politics but worries that would set a new precedent.
“It’s an indication that a Trump administration would think that using CFIUS in this way is perfectly acceptable, an indication of a much more forceful government intervention into economic proceedings,” Danzman said. “We’re doing things differently in the U.S. We’re not giving as much of a benefit of the doubt to market transactions; we are just assuming, as a matter of course, that the government has a right to use its authority to approve transactions.”
Nippon has pledged to invest in new, higher tech and more climate-friendly blast furnace technologies that U.S. Steel currently lacks. The company has also promised to make the U.S. Steel board of directors majority American and to ensure that the company doesn’t offshore US production.
If the deal doesn’t go through, U.S. Steel has suggested it will leave Pittsburgh and shrink its unionized blast furnace operations.
“I think they’re trying to call the bluff of U.S. Steel. That’s kind of a dangerous gamble to make,” Jones said.
She doesn’t see a viable alternative to Nippon. Cleveland-Cliffs offered $7.3 billion for U.S. Steel, half of what Nippon is now offering. The company rejected that deal last year, but Cleveland-Cliffs reiterated its offer this month to buy U.S. Steel if Biden does block the deal.
While some local leaders have supported the deal, opinions are still split. Justin Ellsworth, a rank-and-file U.S. steelworker for nearly 20 years, is against the deal because he doesn’t trust Nippon Steel to keep protections in place after 2026 when union contracts are up for negotiation. He also doesn’t trust Nippon to follow through on its commitments to upgrading facilities.
“If we do get this money, then it’s going to be awesome, which everyone agrees with. There’s just more people who are skeptical of the fact that we’re going to get anything at all,” Ellsworth said. “Unless something’s in writing and it’s clear and it’s not cluttered with conditions, how much can we really trust it?”
Even though he disagrees, Ellsworth said he still understands where local leaders and his colleagues who do support the deal are coming from.
“We’re not a monolith; there’s people with lots of different opinions and some in between,” he said. “But it all is really coming from a place of skepticism and uncertainty.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.