Publish an Economic Security Strategy

• The Trump administration should publish an official economic security strategy that sets a vision for the U.S. role in the global economy.
• The strategy should articulate economic security goals, assess the toolkit of policy instruments available to achieve the goals, invest in enforcement capabilities, and evaluate the impact of economic security tools.

The first Trump administration championed the position that “economic security is national security” and broke with decades of bipartisan foreign economic policy, which historically had focused more on openness and efficiency than addressing security risks and resiliency. The Biden administration carried forward the shift the Trump administration had begun, introducing a diverse set of new trade and investment restrictions and pursuing industrial policies to boost domestic capacity in key sectors such as semiconductors and clean energy.

As the Trump administration returns for a second term, another flurry of economic security actions is likely. For example, the administration is expected to expand the technology controls toward China that Biden put in place and has announced plans to enact wide-ranging tariffs (see Jacob Stokes, “Articulate a Comprehensive, Coherent China Strategy” and Emily Kilcrease, “Articulate a Clear Tariffs Roadmap” in this series). But a flood of new tactical actions is no substitute for a comprehensive strategy. And absent clarity on what the United States ultimately is seeking to achieve on economic security and a vision for the U.S. role in the global economy, there is a risk that the multitude of new interventions will operate at cross-purposes, disrupting the old economic order but without building something constructive to take its place.

The Trump administration should publish an official economic security strategy. The government publishes a proliferation of strategy documents, from the broad, overarching National Security Strategy, which typically defines U.S. security interests for a new administration, to subject-specific strategies, such as recent strategies on cybersecurity and global health security.¹ These documents can take different forms but frequently are used to signal an administration’s priorities, define policy objectives, and outline the steps the government intends to take to achieve them.

The economic security strategy should include four key elements:

Set overarching economic security policy goals. The first element is a clear and compelling articulation of the United States’ policy objectives: What is the vision for success on economic security and a theory of victory for realizing it? Defining policy objectives through a strategy document will help bring discipline to the various government agencies and political appointees who will need to work together to deliver this policy agenda. The strategy will be useful to the extent it helps policymakers face tradeoffs and make decisions among competing priorities. Clarity on U.S. economic security objectives is a prerequisite for assessing whether any given proposed policy will bring the United States closer to or farther away from its articulated goals.

Assess the toolkit. The second key element is a holistic inventory of the array of policy instruments the government uses to achieve its economic security objectives. These policies are implemented by a range of government departments and agencies; many policy instruments address similar objectives and thus may have spillover effects on one another. For instance, industrial policy spending under the CHIPS and Science Act, export controls, and outbound investment restrictions are all relevant to the U.S. objective to maintain as large a lead as possible over China in advanced semiconductor capabilities. To better harmonize policy, the strategy should catalogue these various instruments and match them to relevant policy objectives. As part of this effort, it also should clarify agency roles and responsibilities in implementing each instrument, map areas of potential overlap, and assess whether existing coordination mechanisms are sufficient. The strategy also should consider what, if any, broader changes to bureaucratic structure might better facilitate harmonization.

Invest in enforcement capabilities. A third key element of the strategy is strengthening implementation and enforcement capabilities. While there has been much focus on the announcement of new controls and restrictions in recent years, these measures are only effective if government officials can credibly enforce them. Unfortunately, enforcement too often falls short—as evidenced, for instance, by nominally prohibited semiconductors continuing to be available in China and Russia. The economic security strategy should outline practical steps to strengthen enforcement to prevent bad actors from smuggling products that are export controlled, evading sanctions, and dodging tariffs by illegally transshipping goods through third countries. Critically, in some instances this may require additional resources, including to ensure policymakers have the necessary data and analytical capabilities to identify and track evasion efforts. Government officials have long complained about the outdated and cumbersome IT networks they are forced to rely on, while the private sector has made great strides in developing artificial intelligence (AI) and other analytic tools to derive insights from large data sets and better predict outcomes in complex systems. The strategy should identify pathways to bring similar capabilities inside government.

Commit to rigorous evaluation. Finally, the strategy should include a plan to rigorously evaluate economic security tools over time, to assess whether they are achieving their stated goals, and to understand how they are affecting U.S. competitiveness and technological leadership. Many of these tools are novel, or are being deployed in new and untested ways, and thus there is significant uncertainty about how they will work in practice and what impacts they will have—both intended and unintended. The strategy should identify how the government will evaluate the costs and benefits of its various economic security tools over time, including plans to incorporate lessons learned from evaluations in further refining its policies. The Trump administration has declared its intent to promote government efficiency, including by eliminating wasteful or duplicative spending; evaluation tools will help in such efforts. More importantly, evaluations will help promote government effectiveness on economic security, ensuring agencies have the resources they need to achieve their objectives. The strategy also should commit the administration to release as much data and information from its evaluations to the public as possible, to empower outside researchers and analysts to independently assess the impact of economic security tools.

To date, the U.S. economic security agenda has been built piecemeal from the bottom up, as policymakers grapple reactively with emerging economic security problems and experiment with novel policy responses. And while a flexible, responsive economic security posture is essential, the lack of a clearly defined strategy to knit together disparate actions makes the current approach more whack-a-mole than comprehensive. By publishing an overarching economic security strategy, the Trump administration has the opportunity to redefine foundational principles of U.S. foreign economic policy and provide a north star to guide future policymaking.