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    Unemployment Is Low. Inflation Is Falling. But What Comes Next?

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    Despite hopeful signs, economists worry that a recession is on the way or that the Federal Reserve will cause one in trying to rein in inflation.There are two starkly different ways of looking at the U.S. economy right now: what the data says has happened in the past few months, and what history warns could happen next.Most of the recent data suggests that the economy is strong. The job market is, incredibly, better today than it was in February 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic ripped a hole in the global economy. More people are working. They are paid more. The gaps between them — by race, gender, education or income — are smaller.Even inflation, long the black cloud in the economy’s sunny sky, is showing signs of dissipating. Government data released on Wednesday showed that consumer prices were up 5 percent in March from a year earlier, the slowest pace in nearly two years. Over the past three months, prices have risen at the equivalent of a 3.8 percent annual rate — faster than policymakers would like, but no longer the five-alarm fire it was at its peak last year.Yet for all the good news, economists remain worried that a recession is on the way or that the Federal Reserve will cause one in trying to rein in inflation.“The data has been reassuring,” said Karen Dynan, a Harvard economist and former Treasury official. “The things that we’re nervous about are all the things that we don’t have a lot of hard data about.”Beginning with the banks: Most of the recent data predates the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the upheaval in the banking system that followed. Already, there are signs that small and midsize lenders have begun to tighten their credit standards in response to the crisis, which, in turn, could push the businesses that are their clients to cut back on hiring and investment. The extent of the economic effects won’t be clear for months, but many forecasters — including economists at the Fed — have said that the turmoil has made a recession more likely.The Fed began raising interest rates more than a year ago, but the effect of those increases is just beginning to show up in many parts of the economy. Only in March did the construction industry begin to shed jobs, even though the housing market has been in a slump since the middle of last year. Manufacturers, too, were adding jobs until recently. And consumers are still in the early stages of grappling with what higher rates mean for their ability to buy cars, pay credit card balances and take on other forms of debt.The economic data that paints such a rosy picture of the economy is “a look back into an old world that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics.The Federal Reserve began raising interest rates more than a year ago, but the effect of those increases is just beginning to show up in many parts of the economy.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Shepherdson expects overall job growth to turn negative as soon as this summer, as the combined impact of the Fed’s policies and the bank-lending crunch hit the economy, leading to job cuts. Fed policymakers “have done more than enough” to tame inflation, he said, but appear likely to raise rates again anyway.Other economists, however, argue that the Fed has little choice but to keep raising rates until inflation is definitively in retreat. The recent slowdown in consumer price growth is welcome, they argue, but it is partly a result of the declines in the price of energy and used cars, both of which appear poised to resume climbing. Measures of underlying inflation, which strip away such short-term swings, have fallen only gradually.“Inflation is coming down, but I’m not sure that the momentum will continue if they don’t do more,” said Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a former governor of India’s central bank.The Fed’s goal is to do just enough to bring down inflation without causing such a severe pullback in borrowing and spending that it leads to widespread job cuts and a recession. Striking that balance perfectly, however, is difficult — especially because policymakers must make their decisions based on data that is preliminary and incomplete.“It is going to be extremely hard for them to fine-tune the exact point,” Mr. Rajan said. “They would love to have more time to see what’s happening.”A miss in either direction could have serious consequences.The recovery of the U.S. job market over the past three years has been nothing short of remarkable. The unemployment rate, which neared 15 percent in April 2020, is down to the half-century low it achieved before the pandemic. Employers have added back all 22 million jobs lost during the early weeks of the pandemic, and three million more besides. The intense demand for labor has given workers a rare moment of leverage, in which they could demand better pay from their bosses, or go elsewhere to find it.The strong rebound has especially helped groups that are frequently left behind in less dynamic economic environments. Employment has been rising among people with disabilities, workers with criminal records and those without high school diplomas. The unemployment rate among Black Americans hit a record low in March, and pay gains have in recent years been fastest among the lowest-paid workers.All of that progress, critics say, could be lost if the Fed goes too far in its effort to fight inflation.Consumers are still in the early stages of grappling with what higher rates mean for their ability to buy cars, make credit card payments and take on other forms of debt.Gabby Jones for The New York Times“For this tiny moment, we finally see what a labor market is supposed to do,” said William Spriggs, a Howard University professor and chief economist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And the workers benefiting most from the labor market’s current strength, he said, will be the ones who suffer most from a recession.“You should see from this moment what you are truly risking,” Mr. Spriggs said. With inflation already falling, he said, there is no reason for policymakers to take that risk.“The labor market is finally hitting its stride,” he said. “And instead of celebrating and saying, ‘This is fantastic,’ we have the Fed hanging over everybody and casting shade on this unbelievable set of circumstances and saying, ‘Actually this is bad.’”But other economists caution that there are also risks in the Fed’s doing too little. So far, businesses and consumers have treated inflation mostly as a serious but temporary challenge. If they instead begin to expect high rates of inflation to continue, it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as companies set prices and workers demand raises in anticipation of higher costs.If that happens, the Fed may need to take much more aggressive action to bring inflation to heel, potentially causing a deeper, more painful recession. That, at least according to many economists, is what happened in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Fed, under Paul Volcker, brought inflation under control at the cost of what was, outside of the Great Depression and the pandemic, the highest unemployment rate on record.The real debate isn’t between the relative evils of inflation or unemployment, argued Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former top adviser to President Barack Obama. It is between some unemployment now and potentially much more unemployment later.“You’re risking losing millions of jobs if you wait too long,” Mr. Furman said.There have been some encouraging — though still tentative — signs in recent weeks that the Fed may be succeeding at the delicate task of slowing the economy just enough but not too much.Data from the Labor Department this month showed that employers were posting fewer open positions and that workers were changing jobs less frequently, both signs that the job market was beginning to cool. At the same time, the pool of available workers has grown as more people have rejoined the labor force and immigration has rebounded.The combination of increased supply and reduced demand should, in theory, allow the labor market to come back into balance without leading to widespread job cuts. So far, that appears to be happening: Wage growth, which the Fed fears is contributing to inflation, has slowed, but layoffs and unemployment remain low.Jan Hatzius, chief economist for Goldman Sachs, said the recent job market data made him more optimistic about avoiding a recession. And while that outcome is far from certain, he said, it is worth keeping the current debate in perspective.“Given the incredible downturn in the economy that we saw in 2020 — with obvious fears of a much, much, much worse outcome — if you actually manage to get back to a reasonable inflation rate and high employment levels in, say, a three- to four-year period, it would be a very good outcome,” Mr. Hatzius said. 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    How Janelle Jones’s Story About Black Women and the Economy Caught On

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    The first Black woman to serve as chief economist at the Labor Department advanced the idea that lifting up people on the margins helps everyone else, too.“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.It takes approximately 30 seconds of conversation with Janelle Jones, the chief economist and policy director of one of the largest labor unions in the United States, to learn where she’s from and why it matters.“I’m from Ohio! Is that not obvious?” she exclaimed, at a decibel level that reflects how core the state is to her identity. Lorain, Ohio, to be exact, where her mother and her mother’s mother (and aunts, uncles and cousins) worked in the local Ford plant.Those union jobs, and the upward mobility they provided to millions of Black people who migrated from the South in search of freedom and opportunity, taught Ms. Jones what it means to move from the margins to the middle class. She noticed the difference when her mother switched to making Econoline vans after years serving Happy Meals at McDonald’s — a business that her current employer, the Service Employees International Union, is in a long-running battle to unionize.Now she is fighting to make more jobs as good as the union jobs that supported her family — or, even better, jobs with new safeguards that protect workers’ physical health.“It is a town where one of the best jobs you can have is to work at Ford,” Ms. Jones, 39, said of Lorain. “And while I love that for a lot of the people I know, it’s not the only way a town of 70,000 should be able to have economic security.”Last year, Ms. Jones left the U.S. Labor Department, where she served as chief economist, for the Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly two million security guards, nurses, teachers, airport retail workers and janitors. About two-thirds of the members are women, and more than half are people of color. That’s why the position seemed tailor made for the philosophy she’d developed and advanced over her entire career — that targeting policies to assist some of the most disadvantaged members of society will lift everyone else up in the process.Ms. Jones with Aparna Kumar, assistant director of communications for the Service Employees International Union, at the organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesMs. Jones’s superpower, according to her colleagues, is her ability to translate the economy into a framework that helps workers.For the past several years, Ms. Jones has been developing one central philosophy: Because Black women have historically been concentrated in low-paid caregiving jobs, which are often excluded from labor laws and benefits like Social Security, they have accumulated less wealth and experienced worse health outcomes. Furthermore, Ms. Jones argues, helping Black women — through measures like raising wages in care professions and canceling more student debt — is the best way to construct an economy that functions better for everyone.In 2020, she gave her narrative a name, “Black Women Best.” She came up with it while working for a progressive nonprofit called Groundwork Collaborative, which conducted focus groups across the country to find a narrative about how the economy should work for working people.“They were like, ‘I would like to not be tired,’” Ms. Jones recalled of the participants. “‘I want to buy school supplies.’ ‘I want to know that if my car breaks down, because I think it might, I won’t lose my apartment.’” Solving those basic problems for people with the least resources, she thought, would buoy the labor market from the bottom up.Her premise, which she articulated in a working paper for the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found an eager audience under President Biden, who owed his victory in large part to Black women. It was embraced by influential figures, including corporate economists and a Federal Reserve president, and formed the basis of a 133-page report commissioned by the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls.It hasn’t escaped pushback: Some scholars, including Tommy J. Curry at the University of Edinburgh, counter that Black men are more disadvantaged than Black women. Dr. Curry, a professor specializing in Africana philosophy and Black male studies at the university, said that, while he understands the “political popularity” of Ms. Jones’s theory, the evidence did not back it up. Black women, he said, “have seen higher levels of labor participation, entrepreneurial endeavors supported by government grants, and higher rates of college degree attainment since the 2000s, while Black men have been shown to have greater unemployment, less earnings per dollar — at 51 cents by some measures — and an overall downward mobility.”Ms. Jones declined to respond to Dr. Curry’s critique, but emphasized that her policy recommendations are generally not a zero-sum game.Ms. Jones in her office, meeting remotely with government relations colleagues about their lobbying efforts to increase the federal minimum wage to $15.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesMs. Jones’s desk chronicles her history in photos, books and a letter from President Biden.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“I do think that, in a really short period of time, she’s been able to get traction because people do see it as an additive vision,” said Angela Hanks, who worked with Ms. Jones at Groundwork and is now the chief of programs at the think tank Demos. “In a world where there aren’t a ton of totally new ideas, it’s a new idea. And one that’s resonant because it’s explicit but not exclusionary.”While few concrete policy changes are the result of one person’s efforts, it’s possible to see Ms. Jones’s message in actions as small as a guaranteed income program for Black mothers in Mississippi (now in its fourth round of funding) and as large as the expanded child tax credit and unemployment insurance provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Both federal policies helped low-income people in service professions, where Black women are overrepresented.“What Black Women Best is pushing us to do is to center those who have always been described as ‘deserving’ of their economic hardship,” said Azza Altiraifi, a senior policy manager at the racial justice advocacy group Liberation in a Generation. “Those sorts of stories were not common before. And it’s not because there weren’t people doing that research — it just didn’t seem to be a worthwhile exploration.”Ms. Jones’s path to influencing policy wasn’t a straight line. After majoring in math at Spelman, a historically Black college for women, she started two different Ph.D. programs and dropped out each time, after finding them to be only glancingly useful for the real work she wanted to do.“I felt like economics was the way I could do something for my grandmother, who was on a fixed income, or do something for my cousin, who’s a home health aide,” Ms. Jones said, explaining why she called off her pursuit of a doctorate. “I thought it was going to be labor economics, the things that I love, and it wasn’t. It was like advanced real analysis. It was honestly awful.”Fortunately for Ms. Jones, Washington is littered with Ph.D. dropouts who found policymaking more motivating than academic credentials. She spent years training with economists at the city’s labor-oriented think tanks. When Mr. Biden’s transition team went looking for a chief economist at the Department of Labor, in the wake of nationwide protests for racial equity in early 2020, she was an obvious choice — and became the first Black woman to hold the position.Ms. Jones with Alesia Lucas, assistant director of communications for the Service Employees International Union.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesWorking for Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh, Ms. Jones found, was a unique opportunity to put her ideas into practice. She was charged with carrying out the president’s executive order on advancing racial equity, which instructed each agency to determine how it could eliminate barriers for minorities. Ms. Jones dug in, finding ways to make sure people of color got their share of procurement dollars, unemployment insurance, apprenticeships, jobs at the department, fair performance reviews and everything else that the Labor Department had to offer.Through it all, she argued that the economy hadn’t recovered until everyone was doing well. At times she even had to make that case inside the 17,000-person department, where some of her colleagues didn’t realize that the Black unemployment rate is almost always about twice as high as the white unemployment rate. Other times she had to make that case publicly, in regular videos breaking down the latest jobs report, for the better part of the year she worked at the Labor Department.While the average unemployment rate sank back to its prepandemic level in 2022, the racial gap remained wide. “It took forever — forever — for Black women to recover to even 2018 levels,” Ms. Jones said. She took this message to Twitter, sometimes using memes. In 2021, she didn’t hide her disappointment when the Senate backed off of legislation that came right out of the Black Women Best playbook — including beefed-up subsidies for child and elder care — in the face of opposition from Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat.Mr. Walsh, who recently stepped down as labor secretary, said that Ms. Jones kept him focused on the idea that the prepandemic status quo wasn’t good enough.Ms. Jones is seven months into her new role at the Service Employees International Union.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“Janelle brought her brilliant economic mind, passion for building an accessible, equitable economy for all, and leadership to the Department of Labor at a critical time of transformation in the American economy,” Mr. Walsh said in an email, “insisting that this country’s workers — especially those usually left behind — remain at the forefront of the national policy response to tremendous upheaval.”Ultimately, Black men and women made strong gains as the pandemic waned, in part because in 2021 the Federal Reserve held off on raising interest rates for months in an attempt to cool off the economy, even as prices started to escalate. Raising interest rates makes businesses less willing to expand and often results in layoffs, which tend to hit people of color first. Ms. Jones, who now speaks for millions of union workers, had argued that a tight labor market would reduce racial inequality.“I care about all workers, obviously, but I really, really care about Black and brown women,” Ms. Jones said. “And to be in a place where those workers are centered, where it’s most of our members — it feels like the perfect place to do the things that make me excited.” More

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    California Economy Is on Edge After Tech Layoffs and Studio Cutbacks

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    As recession fears persist, the troubles in major industries have hurt tax revenues, turning the state’s $100 billion surplus into a deficit.California has often been at the country’s economic forefront. Now, as fears of a national recession continue to nag, the state is hoping not to lead the way there.While the California economy maintains its powerhouse status, outranking even those of most countries, the state’s most-powerful sectors — including tech companies and supply chain logistics — have struggled to keep their footing, pummeled by high interest rates, investor skittishness, labor strife and other turmoil.Even the weather hasn’t cooperated. Severe flooding throughout much of the winter, caused by atmospheric rivers, has left farming communities in the Central Valley devastated, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses.Thousands of Californians have been laid off in the last few months, the cost of living is increasingly astronomical, and Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed in January that the state faced a $22.5 billion deficit in the 2023-24 fiscal year — a plummet from the $100 billion surplus a year ago.“It’s an EKG,” Mr. Newsom said at the time, comparing a graph of the state’s revenue to the sharp spikes and drops of the heart’s electrical activity. “That sums up California’s tax structure. It sums up the boom-bust.”The structure, which relies in large part on taxing the incomes of the wealthiest Californians, often translates into dips when Silicon Valley and Wall Street are uneasy, as they are now. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, one of the state’s most prominent corporations, said in January that it was cutting 12,000 workers worldwide, and Silicon Valley Bank, a key lender to tech start-ups, collapsed last month, sending the federal government scrambling to limit the fallout.This has coincided with a drop in venture capital funding as rising interest rates and recession fears have led investors to become more risk-averse. That money, which declined 36 percent globally from 2021 to 2022, according to the management consulting firm Bain & Company, is critical to Silicon Valley’s ability to create jobs.“The tech sector is the workhorse of the state’s economy, it’s the backbone,” said Sung Won Sohn, a finance and economics professor at Loyola Marymount University. “These are high earners who might not be able to carry the state as much as they did in the past.”Gov. Gavin Newsom, center, said in January that the state faced a $22.5 billion deficit in the 2023-24 fiscal year, after a $100 billion surplus a year ago.Lipo Ching/EPA, via ShutterstockEntertainment, another pillar of California’s economy, has also been in retreat as studios adjust to new viewing habits. Disney, based in Burbank, announced in February that it would eliminate 7,000 jobs worldwide.In California alone, employment in the information sector, a category that includes technology and entertainment workers, declined by more than 16,000 from November to February, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which predates a recent wave of job cuts in March.A recent survey from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found widespread pessimism about the economy. Two-thirds of respondents said they expected bad economic times for the state in the next year, and a solid majority — 62 percent — said they felt the state was already in a recession.When Mr. Newsom announced the deficit earlier in the year, he vowed not to dip into the state’s $37 billion in reserves, and instead called for pauses in funding for child care and reduced funding for climate change initiatives. Joe Stephenshaw, director of the California Department of Finance, said in an interview that he and top economists had begun to spot points of concern — persistent inflation, higher interest rates and a turbulent stock market — on the state’s horizon during the second half of last year.“Those risks became realities,” said Mr. Stephenshaw, an appointee of the governor.He acknowledged that the problem was driven largely by declines in high earners’ incomes, including from market-based compensation, such as stock options and bonus payments. As activity slowed, he said, interest rates rose and stock prices fell.But the state’s problems aren’t limited to the tech industry.Cargo processing at the Port of Los Angeles in February was down 43 percent from the year before.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesCalifornia’s robust supply chain, which drives nearly a third of the state’s economy, has continued to buckle under stresses from the pandemic and an ongoing labor fight between longshoremen and port operators up and down the West Coast, which has prompted many shipping companies to rely instead on ports along the Gulf and East Coasts. Cargo processing at the Port of Los Angeles, a key entry point for shipments from Asia, was down 43 percent in February, compared with the year before.“The longer it drags on, the more cargo will be diverted,” said Geraldine Knatz, a professor of the practice of policy and engineering at the University of Southern California, who was executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014. Still, wherever the economic cycle is leading, California heads into it with some strengths. Although unemployment in February, at 4.3 percent, was higher than in most states, it was lower than the rate a year earlier. In the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, unemployment was below 3.5 percent, better than the national average.Over decades, California’s economy has historically seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, part of the state’s boom-bust history. During the recession of the early 1990s, largely driven by cuts to aerospace after the end of the Cold War, California was hit much harder than other parts of the country.Zeeshan Haque is looking for a job after losing his position as a software engineer at Google. “It’s just very competitive at this time because of so many layoffs,” he said.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesIn March, the U.C.L.A. Anderson Forecast, which provides economic analysis, released projections for both the nation and California, pointing to two possible scenarios — one in which a recession is avoided and another in which it occurs toward the end of this year.“Even in our recession scenario we have a mild recession,” said Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the Anderson Forecast.Regardless of which scenario pans out, California’s economy is likely to be better off than the national one, according to the report, which cited increased demand for software and defense goods, areas in which California is a leader. Mr. Nickelsburg also said the state’s rainy-day fund was healthy enough to withstand the decline in tax revenues. But that shortfall could complicate the speed at which Mr. Newsom can carry out some of his ambitious, progressive policies. In announcing the deficit, Mr. Newsom scaled back funding for climate proposals to $48 billion, from $54 billion.The fiscal outlook also casts a cloud over progressive proposals, widely supported by Democrats, who have a supermajority in the Legislature.A state panel that has been debating reparations for Black Californians is set to release its final report by midyear. Economists have projected that reparations could cost $800 billion to compensate for overpolicing, housing discrimination and disproportionate incarceration rates. Once the panel releases its report, it will be up to lawmakers in Sacramento to decide how much state revenue would support reparations — a concept that Mr. Newsom has endorsed.Through all this, one thing has remained constant: Many Californians say their biggest economic concern is housing costs.The median value for a single-family home in California is about $719,000 — up nearly 1 percent from last year, according to Zillow — and recent census data shows that some of the state’s biggest metro areas, including Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties, have continued to shrink. (In Texas, where many Californians have relocated, the median home value is about $289,000.)Still, some Californians remain optimistic.Zeeshan Haque, a former software engineer at Google, learned in January that he was being laid off. His last day was March 31.“It was out of nowhere and very abrupt,” said Mr. Haque, 32, who recently moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles.He bought a $740,000 house in the city’s Chatsworth neighborhood in February and spent time focusing on renovations. But in recent weeks, he has begun to look for a new job. He recently updated his LinkedIn avatar to show the hashtag #opentowork and said he hoped to land a new job soon.“It’s just very competitive at this time because of so many layoffs,” he said.Ben Casselman More

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    U.S. Job Growth Eases, but Extends Its Streak

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    Employers added 236,000 jobs as the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases appeared to take a toll. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent.The U.S. economy generated hearty job growth in March, but at a slowing rate that appeared to reflect the toll of steadily rising interest rates.Employers added 236,000 jobs in the month on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, down from an average of 334,000 jobs added over the prior six months. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, from 3.6 percent in February.The year-over-year growth in average hourly earnings also slowed, to 4.2 percent, the slowest pace since July 2021 — a sign the Federal Reserve has been looking for as it seeks to quell inflation. And the average workweek shortened with the easing of staffing shortages, which had required workers to cover extra hours.Preston Caldwell, chief U.S. economist at Morningstar Research, said the data offered fresh hope that the Fed could cool off the economy without causing a recession. “It does look like the range of options that are adjacent to what we might call a soft landing is expanding,” he said. “Wage growth has mostly normalized now without a massive uptick in unemployment. And a year ago, a lot of people were not predicting that.”Wage growth is slowing and is still behind inflationYear-over-year percentage change in earnings vs. inflation More

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    Jobs Report Bolsters Biden’s Economic Pitch, but Inflation Still Nags

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    WASHINGTON — Gradually slowing job gains and a growing labor force in March delivered welcome news to President Biden, nearly a year after he declared that the job market needed to cool significantly to tame high prices.The details of the report are encouraging for a president whose economic goal is to move from rapid job gains — and high inflation — to what Mr. Biden has called “stable, steady growth.” Job creation slowed to 236,000 for the month, closing in on the level Mr. Biden said last year would be necessary to stabilize the economy and prices. More Americans joined the labor force, and wage gains fell slightly. Those developments should help to further cool inflation.But the report also underscored the political and economic tensions for the president as he seeks to sell Americans on his economic stewardship ahead of an expected announcement this spring that he will seek re-election.Republicans criticized Mr. Biden for the deceleration in hiring and wage growth. Some analysts warned that after a year of consistently beating forecasters’ expectations, job growth appeared set to fall sharply or even turn negative in the coming months. That is in part because banks are pulling back lending after administration officials and the Federal Reserve intervened last month to head off a potential financial crisis.Surveys suggest that Americans’ views of the economy are improving, but that people remain displeased by its performance and pessimistic about its future. A CNN poll conducted in March and released this week showed that seven in 10 Americans rated the economy as somewhat or very poor. Three in five respondents expected the economy to be poor a year from now.As he tours the country in preparation for the 2024 campaign, Mr. Biden has built his economic pitch around a record rebound in job creation. He regularly visits factories and construction sites in swing states, casting corporate hiring promises as direct results of a White House legislative agenda that produced hundreds of billions of dollars in new investments in infrastructure, low-emission energy, semiconductor manufacturing and more.On Friday, the president took the same approach to the March employment data. “This is a good jobs report for hardworking Americans,” he said in a written statement, before listing seven states where companies this week have announced expansions that Mr. Biden linked to his agenda.But as he frequently does, Mr. Biden went on to caution that “there is more work to do” to bring down high prices that are squeezing workers and families.Aides were equally upbeat. Lael Brainard, who directs Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, told MSNBC that it was a “really nice” report overall.“Generally this report is consistent with steady and stable growth,” Ms. Brainard said. “We’re seeing some moderation — we’re certainly seeing reduction in inflation that has been quite welcome.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But analysts warned that the coming months could bring a much more rapid deterioration in hiring, as banks pull back on lending in the wake of the government bailout of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote Friday that he expected job gains to fall to just 50,000 in May, and for the economy to begin shedding jobs on a net basis over the summer. But he acknowledged that the job market continued to surprise analysts, in a good way, by pulling more and more workers back into the labor force.“Labor demand and supply are moving back into balance,” Mr. Shepherdson wrote.In May, Mr. Biden wrote that monthly job creation needed to fall from an average of 500,000 jobs to something closer to 150,000, a level that he said would be “consistent with a low unemployment rate and a healthy economy.”Since then, the president has had a complicated relationship with the labor market. Job creation has remained far stronger than many forecasters — and Mr. Biden himself — expected. That growth has delighted Mr. Biden’s political advisers and helped the economy avoid a recession. But it has been accompanied by inflation well above historical norms, which continues to hamstring consumers and dampen Mr. Biden’s approval ratings.The March report showed the political difficulty of reconciling those two economic realities. Analysts called the cooling in job and wage growth welcome signs for the Federal Reserve in its campaign to bring down inflation by raising interest rates.But that cooling included a decline of 1,000 manufacturing jobs, for which some groups blamed the Fed. “America’s factories continue to experience the destabilizing influence of rising interest rates,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a trade group. “The Federal Reserve must understand that its policies are undermining our global competitiveness.”Republicans blasted Mr. Biden for falling wage growth. “Average hourly wages continue to trend down even as inflation has wiped out any nominal wage gains for more than two years,” Tommy Pigott, rapid response director for the Republican National Committee, said in a news release.Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said the report showed that “small businesses and job creators are reacting to the dark clouds looming over the economy.”In his own release, Mr. Biden nodded to one of the clouds that could turn into an economic storm as soon as this summer: a standoff over raising the nation’s borrowing limit, which could result in a government default that throws millions of Americans out of work. Republicans have refused to budge unless Mr. Biden agrees to unspecified spending cuts.Mr. Biden has refused to negotiate directly over raising the limit. He closed his jobs report statement on Friday with a shot at congressional Republicans’ strategy. “I will stop those efforts to put our economy at risk,” he said. More

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    In Ohio, Electric Cars Are Starting to Reshape Jobs and Companies

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    Erick Belmer has seen how tough the car business can be. He was working at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, when it shut down in 2019, devastating the community.Mr. Belmer, an industrial mechanic, got another job at a G.M. transmission factory in Toledo, but his commute is now 140 miles each way. His schedule gives him just a few hours with his family and a few hours of sleep.Yet far from being bitter, Mr. Belmer says he is excited. G.M. is converting his factory to produce electric motors, part of an industrial transformation that will redefine manufacturing regions and jobs around the world.G.M., Ford Motor and other carmakers announced investments of more than $50 billion in new factories in the United States last year, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. All but a small fraction of that money was to build and retool plants for electric vehicles and batteries.Mr. Belmer is one of thousands of people who will also have to pick up new skills. “It’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve,” he said at the Toledo factory. “But our guys are well equipped to handle this.”Mr. Belmer and Ohio are bellwethers of how the transition to electric vehicles will play out. G.M., Jeep, Honda Motor and parts makers employ many thousands of people across this state.Gas transmissions at G.M.’s plant in Toledo. G.M. has committed to retraining the workers there to make electric motors, and to investing $760 million to convert the plant’s assembly lines.Ohio’s experience may signal how the transition to electric vehicles will play out for workers.An electric drive unit on display at the G.M. plant.Ohio produces more internal combustion engines than any other state, making an adjustment to electric cars particularly urgent. Nearly 90,000 people work in Ohio for carmakers or parts suppliers, and several times that many are employed by businesses that serve those autoworkers and their families.The changes are putting Ohio at the forefront of a new technology that is critical to fighting climate change. But some jobs will become obsolete, and some companies will go bankrupt. It’s an open question whether the winners will outnumber the losers.“This is the largest transition in our industry since its inception,” said Tony Totty, the president of a United Auto Workers local that represents G.M. workers in Toledo.Mr. Totty is optimistic about the members of his local. But he is worried about other colleagues whose jobs are tied to gasoline engines, he said.There is “an expiration date on those facilities and those communities,” Mr. Totty said.Warren, in eastern Ohio, knows what happens when a carmaker leaves town. The city lost one-third of its population, about 20,000 people, after G.M. closed the factory in nearby Lordstown, which produced Chevrolet Cruze sedans, in 2019. Sales of that car had been fading as more Americans chose sport utility vehicles.Even before that shutdown, auto production jobs had been declining. U.S. automakers and their parts suppliers employed about one million people at the end of 2018, down from more than 1.3 million in 2000. In the years before G.M. closed the Lordstown plant, it had reduced shifts and pared its work force.“Our biggest export for the last 20 years has been talented young people,” said Rick Stockburger, the president of Brite Energy Innovators, an organization in Warren that offers work space, advice and funding to start-ups.Today, things are looking somewhat better. Ultium Cells, a joint venture of G.M. and LG Energy Solution, is ramping up production of batteries near the defunct factory.Tony Totty, the president of the United Auto Workers local that represents G.M.’s workers in Toledo, said the current moment represented “the largest transition in our industry since its inception.”Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer, has taken over the old G.M. plant and plans to produce electric vehicles and tractors there. The complex will also house an “electric vehicle academy” established by Foxconn and Youngstown State University to train workers.That surge in investment is helping to revive Warren’s tidy but sleepy downtown. Doug Franklin, the mayor, who worked for G.M. in Lordstown, said he was pleased recently to step into a local restaurant where “nobody knew me, because we had so many new people.”Mr. Franklin represents the optimistic view — that an industrial renaissance is underway. The pandemic and the supply chain chaos that it caused have made companies leery of components produced far away. That experience, plus billions in federal subsidies approved by Democrats last year, motivated manufacturers to build vehicles, batteries and other components in the United States.“We’re seeing a new level of hope that I haven’t seen in decades,” Mr. Franklin said.But community leaders in Warren are also aware that the transition comes with risks.Hopes that the old plant will become a buzzing electric vehicle factory have not panned out, so far. G.M. sold the factory to Lordstown Motors, a fledgling electric pickup truck company that ran into trouble and resold the plant to Foxconn.Executives at Foxconn, which has long assembled electronic devices but has little experience making cars, declined interview requests. It’s not clear when the company will mass-produce electric vehicles in Lordstown, if ever.The Rev. Todd Johnson, the pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Warren and a member of the City Council, worries that his mostly African American parishioners won’t benefit from the new jobs.Mr. Johnson, whose parents worked for G.M., encourages young people to study subjects like robotics and coding, and has led after-church trips to a science and technology center in nearby Youngstown.“There are going to be opportunities coming,” he said, “and I desperately don’t want to see the next generation of our children miss out.”One pressing question is what will happen to people whose skills are no longer needed.Eric Gonzales, the executive director of G.M.’s Toledo factory, says the plant will need at least as many workers as it has today, as it replaces its gasoline models with electric ones.G.M. is dealing with that issue at the Toledo factory, Toledo Propulsion Systems, which makes transmissions that electric cars won’t need. The automaker has committed to retraining the Toledo workers to make electric motors, and to investing $760 million to convert assembly lines at the plant.If anything, G.M. will need more workers, said Eric Gonzales, the executive director of the factory, as it replaces gasoline models with electric cars. “We’re taking the employees with us.”The G.M. factory in Toledo will show whether established automakers can compete with Tesla, the fast-growing automaker that can focus all of its resources on electric vehicles because that’s all it makes. Established carmakers need to keep earning money from internal combustion vehicles while ramping up a new technology that is not yet profitable.G.M. has an advantage, Mr. Gonzales said, because it has factories equipped with sprinkler systems, high-voltage power and other essentials. “We already have the four walls here with the infrastructure,” he said, speaking above the din of clanking machinery. “Somebody new, they have very expensive capital costs.”Other auto executives prefer to start fresh. Volkswagen’s new Scout Motors unit looked at sites in Ohio and other states to produce electric pickup trucks and S.U.V.s, but chose to build a $2 billion factory in South Carolina.It’s cheaper and easier to build from scratch, said Scott Keogh, the chief executive of Scout. “You’re not juggling this classic dynamic of a legacy internal combustion engine plant where you need to inject a new electric vehicle,” he said.Workers placing batteries in hybrid vehicles at the Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio.Ohio is in intense competition with other states to attract investment. But Midwestern states, including Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, have been less successful than states in the South where Republican political leaders have courted investment aggressively — even as they denounce the Democratic policies that helped create the boom.Since 2020, automakers have announced investments of $51 billion in electric vehicle and battery production in the South, compared with $31 billion in states in the Great Lakes region, according to the Center for Automotive Research.Southern states tend to have lower labor costs, in part because most auto plants there are not unionized. This could pose a problem for the United Auto Workers and President Biden, who want the switch to electric vehicles to create more high-paying union jobs. It could well be that most of the new electric car and battery jobs will end up in the South, where unions face political opposition, and not in the Midwest, where unions have political clout — and where most of the jobs lost in combustion engine vehicles once were.Ohio has some things going for it. In March, Honda Motor said it would convert one of two assembly lines at its decades-old plant in Marysville, near Columbus, to build electric vehicles. Honda, a Japanese company, is also building a battery factory about an hour away, in Jeffersonville, with LG Energy Solution.In Ohio, Honda employs more than 14,000 people making cars and motors, and the company’s plans will show whether electric vehicles, which require fewer parts than gasoline cars, will create or destroy jobs.Honda’s assembly line of electric-car batteries at its Marysville plant.For the next several years, the transition will probably create jobs as carmakers make both gasoline and electric vehicles. Bob Nelson, the executive vice president of American Honda Motor, noted that, at the moment, there was a shortage of skilled labor. “We’re going to need everybody,” he said in Marysville, where Honda makes Accord sedans.What happens later is less certain. “When you don’t have the complexity that we’re used to, with engines and transmissions and mufflers and radiators and exhaust systems and all those components that aren’t going to be there anymore,” said Bruce Baumhower, the president of a United Auto Workers local that represents employees of auto suppliers in Ohio, “it makes me wonder what’s left.”Dana Incorporated, based in Maumee, near Toledo, is also grappling with that question. Dana’s employees — more than 40,000 of them — make axles, drive shafts and other parts. Electric vehicles need axles but typically do not need long drive shafts because the motors can be placed close to the wheels.James Kamsickas, Dana’s chief executive, has spent time in China and has been struck by the proliferation of electric vehicles there. Recognizing the threat to some of Dana’s products, Mr. Kamsickas acquired several firms with expertise in electric motors and other technology.James Kamsickas, right, Dana’s chief executive, has acquired several firms with expertise in electric motors and other technology.Dana now offers axles with electric motors built in, saving weight and energy, and it has deployed its expertise in gaskets to make equipment for cooling electric-car batteries that G.M. plans to use. Most of Dana’s orders are for products related to electric vehicles.Ohio’s economic future hinges on whether other companies make similar leaps. “You don’t have a choice,” Mr. Kamsickas said. “Sooner or later, you’d be a melting iceberg.” More

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    Job Openings Fell in February, JOLTS Report Shows

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    The U.S. job market continues to ease off its red-hot pace, a government report shows, but there are still more openings than unemployed workers.Demand for workers in the United States eased in February, a sign that the red-hot labor market continues to cool off somewhat.There were 9.9 million job openings in February, down from 10.6 million on the last day of January, the Labor Department reported Tuesday in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS.The drop in open positions is a signal that the labor market is slowing, but the report included data that points to a still-healthy environment for workers: Four million workers quit their jobs during the month, a slight increase from January, and the number of layoffs decreased slightly to 1.5 million.There were 1.7 jobs open for every unemployed worker in February, a decline from 1.9 in January. The Federal Reserve has been paying close attention to that ratio as it looks to slow hiring, part of its effort to contain inflation.Until recent months, the number of available jobs had risen substantially as the economy recovered from the pandemic recession, with companies rushing to hire workers after public health restrictions were rolled back.“The general trend in JOLTS in recent months has been a gradual movement back toward more normal labor market dynamics,” said Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “This looks more like a rebalancing. Job openings were way up in the stratosphere.”The gradual slowing may be encouraging for policymakers. Fed officials worry that a tight job market is contributing to inflation, as employers may feel pressure to raise wages to compete for workers and then pass along price increases to consumers. The number of available openings has remained high in spite of climbing borrowing costs.The central bank has raised interest rates to about 5 percent, from near zero, over the past year, aiming to make it costlier for companies to expand and consumers to spend. But it also wants to avoid setting off widespread layoffs or causing lasting damage to the labor market.“We’re still in a market that is quite strong,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. But, he added, “the cool-off is more apparent now.”One measure of inflation that the Fed watches closely — the Personal Consumption Expenditures index — showed that price gains slowed substantially in February, to 5 percent on an annual basis, down from 5.3 percent in January.Despite high-profile job cuts in the tech sector, layoffs overall have been historically low, a sign that employers may be reluctant to part with workers hired during pandemic-era spikes. The number of workers quitting their jobs voluntarily — a sign that they are confident they can find work elsewhere — rose slightly in February, to four million.“The layoffs we’re seeing all over the media in tech and finance are being more than offset by an absence of layoffs and discharges in the Main Street economy,” Ms. Pollak said. “Labor-market dynamics look pretty favorable to workers still,” she added.JOLTS is considered a lagging indicator, telling more about conditions in the recent past than offering information about what may come. On Friday, the Labor Department will release employment data for March. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect the report to show that employers added about 240,000 jobs, a slight slowdown from February but still a pace of hiring that reflects a robust labor market. More

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    Biden’s Reluctant Approach to Free Trade Draws Backlash

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    A law intended to bolster clean energy manufacturing has ignited debate over whether the U.S. should work to break down international trade barriers — or keep them intact to protect American workers.WASHINGTON — Since President Biden came into office two years ago, the United States has declined to pursue new comprehensive free-trade agreements with other countries, arguing that most Americans have turned against the kind of pacts that promote global commerce but that also help to send factory jobs overseas.But in recent months, with the rollout of a sweeping climate bill intended to bolster clean energy manufacturing, the lack of free-trade agreements with some of America’s closest allies has suddenly become a major headache for the administration.The dispute, which centers on which countries can receive benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act, has caused significant rifts with foreign governments and drawn blowback from Congress. And it is helping to reignite a debate over whether the United States should be working to break down trade barriers with other countries — or keep them intact in an attempt to protect American workers.The law as written offers tax credits for electric vehicles that are built in North America or that are made with battery minerals from the United States and countries with which it has a free-trade agreement.Those provisions have angered allies in Europe and elsewhere that, despite close ties with America, do not actually have free-trade agreements with the United States. They have complained that companies in their countries would be put at a disadvantage to U.S. firms that can receive the subsidies. To soothe relations, the Biden administration has developed a complicated workaround, in which it is signing limited new trade deals with Japan and the European Union.But that solution has vexed lawmakers of both parties, who say that these agreements are not valid and that the administration needs to ask Congress to approve the kind of free-trade agreement the law envisions.“It’s a fix,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in trade, adding that they were not free-trade agreements “by any reasonable definition of the term.”The World Trade Organization defines a free-trade agreement as covering “substantially all trade” between countries. In the United States, such broad agreements need the approval of Congress, though the executive branch has the authority to negotiate much narrower agreements.Administration officials argue that because the Inflation Reduction Act does not define the term “free-trade agreement,” these narrower pacts are allowed. But in hearings before the House and the Senate last month, lawmakers criticized the administration for bypassing Congress in making these agreements.Some lawmakers argued for more traditional free-trade deals, while others voiced support for new deals with higher labor and environmental standards, like the North American agreement Congress approved in 2020.In hearings, Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, highlighted efforts to raise global labor standards and decarbonize industries, and said she and her colleagues were “writing a new story on trade.”Mariam Zuhaib/Associated PressIn her opening statement at the hearings, Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, set out a vision for a trade policy that was different from those of previous administrations, focused more on defending American workers from unfair foreign competition than opening up global markets. Ms. Tai said she and her colleagues were “writing a new story on trade” that would put working families first and reflect the interests of a wider cross section of Americans.Speaking before the Senate on Thursday, Ms. Tai said she remained “open minded” about doing more trade agreements if they would help address the challenges the country has today.The Biden administration has long insisted that past approaches to trade policy — in which other countries gained access to the U.S. market through low or zero tariffs — ended up hurting American workers and enriching multinational companies, which simply moved U.S. jobs and factories overseas. In contrast, Biden officials have pledged to strengthen the economy and to make the country more competitive with China by expanding the country’s infrastructure and manufacturing, rather than negotiating new trade deals.The administration is currently negotiating trade frameworks for the Indo-Pacific region and the Americas, and is engaging in trade talks with Taiwan, Kenya and other governments. But, to the dissatisfaction of some lawmakers in both parties, none of these agreements are expected to involve significantly opening up foreign markets by lowering tariffs, as more traditional trade deals have done..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Representative Adrian Smith, a Nebraska Republican who leads the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, said in the hearing that he was concerned the United States had “lost momentum on trade” even as China continued to aggressively broaden its own partnerships.“I cannot express strongly enough,” he added, “that the administration cannot just come up with new definitions of what a trade agreement is for some reason, and certainly not to give handouts for electric vehicles.”“You have to appreciate that we live in a very different world,” Ms. Tai responded. She said the Biden administration sought to adapt its policies to respond “to the world we’re living in, and not the world that we want to live in.”Part of the pressure stems from the fact that other countries — including China — are continuing to pursue more traditional trade deals that lower their tariffs with trading partners, giving their companies an advantage over businesses based elsewhere. On Friday, British officials announced that they had reached an agreement to join a Pacific trade pact that, despite being devised by the Obama administration, does not include the United States.Membership in the so-called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership will allow Britain to export products tariff-free to 11 other countries. With the inclusion of Britain, the pact will represent 15 percent of the global economy, British officials said.Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a U.S. group that lobbies on behalf of major multinational companies, called the news “a stark reminder that the world isn’t waiting for the United States.”“While we congratulate the U.K. government for being part of this massive agreement, it’s frustrating to see America’s allies writing global rules and creating new market opportunities without the United States,” he said.Politicians of both parties have found support for free-trade agreements to be controversial in the United States in recent years. The Trans-Pacific Partnership — the original deal negotiated by the Obama administration with 11 other nations circling the Pacific Ocean — received criticism from labor unions and other progressive Democrats who said it would ship jobs overseas. Hillary Clinton opposed it as a candidate in the 2016 presidential election.As president, Donald J. Trump also criticized the deal and officially withdrew the United States from it in 2017. He also scrapped a negotiation over a comprehensive trade deal the Obama administration had been carrying out with the European Union.The Biden administration is trying to reach trade frameworks for the Indo-Pacific region and the Americas, but none of these agreements are expected to involve significantly opening up foreign markets by lowering tariffs.Coley Brown for The New York TimesMr. Trump went on to sign a series of limited trade deals with Japan and China without congressional approval. He also oversaw an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement that was ratified by Congress, which he named the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.Democrats also came to support that deal after adding significant protections for workers and the environment.Some trade experts have speculated that the Biden administration will try to build on the success of the U.S.M.C.A. by adding more nations to the pact, or by applying its terms to negotiations elsewhere. But so far, the Biden administration has not announced any such plans.Two top Democratic lawmakers focused on trade issued a statement last week criticizing the limited agreement the Biden administration had signed with Japan and urging officials to try to replicate the success of the U.S.M.C.A. by working with Congress to draft new deals with enforceable environmental and labor protections.“U.S.M.C.A. is a prime example of what’s possible when the executive and Congress collaborate, and its enforcement mechanisms should be the floor for future agreements,” Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon who leads the Finance Committee, said in the statement.Republicans have also been split over how aggressively to pursue new free-trade agreements. More traditional free-traders — like those from agricultural states that depend on exporting goods overseas — have been at odds with a growing populist contingent that favors industrial policy and trade barriers to protect American workers.Still, Kelly Ann Shaw, a partner with Hogan Lovells in Washington and a former economic adviser to the Trump administration, said that “the amount of inaction by the administration is doing a lot to unify Republicans” around pursuing more free-trade deals.“If you would ask me two years ago, I would have thought that Republicans were more split on this issue than they really are,” she said. “But it’s pretty clear that we’re losing out on opportunities by sitting on our hands and doing nothing.” More