Departent of Commerce

This is charged with promoting economic growth, innovation, and competitiveness while providing the data that American businesses need to succeed.

Intended to serve with clarity of purpose as the voice of business in any President’s Cabinet, the Department of Commerce has suffered from decades of regulatory capture, ideological drift, and lack of focus. One long-standing joke maintains that the department, with its lack of coherence, is a holding company for the parts of the federal government that could not be housed elsewhere. Thus, in the 1990s, calls emerged to abolish the department and either spin off, zero-out, or consolidate its functions among other entities.1 At the same time, the department has a higher profile now than perhaps ever in its history.

It possesses key tools to address decades of poor decision-making in Washington and is central to any plan to reverse the precipitous economic decline sparked by the Biden Administration and to counter Communist China. Both assertions can be equally true, that the department possesses the expertise, programs, and authorities that will be crucial to the success of a conservative presidency and that its role in the federal bureaucracy would benefit from streamlining and reform.

Many programs at the Department of Commerce overlap in whole or part with other governmental programs, and consolidating and streamlining these could increase both accountability and return on taxpayer investment. Any exercise in government-wide budgeting and reform should review the department with an eye toward consolidation, elimination, or privatization that examines the efficiency, effectiveness, and underlying philosophy of each individual component. Though not an exhaustive set of proposals, the next conservative President should con- sider whether:

The International Trade Administration (ITA) and parts of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) should be streamlined and moved to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), along with the Development Finance Corporation; the U.S. Trade and Development Agency; the Export– Import Bank; and other trade-related programs spread across the federal government—as well as considering whether many of these programs should exist within the federal government; The Economic Development Administration’s grant programs, which are among a broad set of duplicative and overlapping federal economic development grant programs, should be consolidated with other programs and/or eliminated;

The Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau, as well as the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, should be consolidated into a more manageable, focused, and efficient statistical agency; The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should be made into a performance-based organization under the Office of Management and Budget (OMB);

Alternatively, the USPTO should be consolidated with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in a new U.S. Office of Patents, Trademarks, and Standards, with all non-mission-critical research functions eliminated or moved to other, more focused, federal agencies; and The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. Almost every element of the department can be viewed through this lens, but with today’s political reality and multiple competing congressional committee jurisdictions, drastic structural change to the department is neither imminent nor likely. Thus, this chapter largely accepts the baseline of today’s department and proposes a bold, but achievable, set of proposals for an incoming conservative Administration.

Whatever the imperfections of the Department of Commerce, it is blessed with many quality civil servants and strong statutory authorities that, directed properly, — 664 —Department of Commerce can help ensure U.S. success in 2025 and beyond. With that in mind, this chapter focuses primarily on policy, strategy, and occasionally tactics that are either imme- diately implementable under strong leadership or are critical to mission success.

The Office of the Secretary (OS) is somewhat of a misnomer, as very few of the thousands of employees working in the office are dedicated to staffing the secretary and implementing Administration priorities. Rather, OS’s budget and full-time equivalents have increasingly been allocated to fulfill financial, human resources, administrative, information technology, contracting, and facilities functions, using outdated and inefficient systems. The Trump Administration began implement- ing key changes, such as updating financial management tools, but more must be done to digitize and modernize the department’s processes to free resources for secretarial and presidential priorities.

The above drain on resources leaves the Secretary of Commerce to rely upon a few dozen direct support staff, supplemented with detailees and indirect fund- ing from each of the bureaus to execute the President’s agenda and manage the diverse functions of the department. This structure empowers career staff in each bureau and makes it harder to mandate change. As such, it is vitally important that an incoming Administration fully staff OS with political appointees, send all existing detailees back to their home bureaus on Day One, and replace those detailees with trusted and knowledgeable career staff on an as-needed basis. Department of Commerce leadership should also fight to restore direct fund- ing and additional political appointee positions to OS and its constituent parts involved in implementing and communicating the Commerce Secretary’s and President’s policy priorities.

Administration, Budget, and Appropriations. Recent practice has been for career staff to serve as gatekeepers between department leadership and external budget and appropriations partners at the OMB and on Capitol Hill. By serving not just as a central point of contact but as the sole staff-level communicators of departmental priorities, these career officials can, have, and will slow down—and even stop—changes in policy, even at the line-office level. Although the following is true at all agencies, it is particularly important at the Department of Commerce that political leadership be immediately installed at the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Assistant Secretary for Administra- tion (ASA), and that political appointees receive a mandate to communicate with external partners alongside career staff at every stage of the budget and appropri- ations process. Political appointees must also monitor internal CFO operations down to the operating division level to ensure that funds are not being diverted to programs that do not align with Administration priorities, as has regularly hap- pened in years past.

Advisory Committees. Due to the nature of the Department of Commerce’s portfolio, many of its advisory committees are populated by activists from organi- zations openly hostile to conservative principles who use the committees to impede conservative policy. Upon entering office, all such committees should be reviewed regarding whether they are required by statute and abolished if they are not. Mem- bership of the remaining committees should be reconstituted to ensure they are sources of genuine expert advice and productive contributions to the policy-making process. Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) compliance and awareness of any ways the committees have been written into regulations should be considered.