What to Know in Washington: 39,000 Lost Jobs Thwart Biden’s Wins

Workers at Milwaukee’s Master Lock factory stood to make $100,000 or more a year just a decade ago as they helped churn out the padlocks that secure America’s school lockers and backyard sheds.

But now the plant signals a soft spot in President Joe Biden’s economic pitch for reelection. That’s because today, Master Lock is shuttering the 85-year-old facility for good, shifting production to Mexico, China, and North Carolina and erasing hundreds of union jobs in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Photographer: Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg

Signage outside the Master Lock manufacturing plant in Milwaukee on March 9.

At the core of Biden’s first-term agenda has been a drive to bring middle-class factory jobs home and provide government incentives to reshore strategic industries such as semiconductors.

He’s had some success. Since the 2020 pandemic recession, the economy has regained all the factory jobs it lost—the first time in almost 50 years such a recovery has happened. Some 146,000 more people work in manufacturing than five years ago, and billions of dollars in subsidies are fueling an investment boom in new factories destined to add even more jobs.

That renaissance, however, has benefited some states more than others. Across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — three key election battleground states with proud industrial pasts — there were still 39,000 fewer people employed in factories in February than five years earlier.

It’s a deficit that, along with inflation, explains why many voters in those states don’t credit Biden for a economy that, by most metrics, is in historically good shape. Read more from Shawn Donnan and Christopher Cannon.

BIDEN’S AGENDA

• The president and first lady will leave New York a little after noon for Joint Base Andrews on their way to Hagerstown, Md.
• The Bidens will leave Hagerstown for Camp David, where they’ll land after 3 p.m.

Also Happening on the Hill

Photographer: Oliver Contreras/Bloomberg

Slotkin at the U.S. Capitol

Reps. ELISSA SLOTKIN, ABIGAIL SPANBERGER, and KATIE PORTER have all been critical to Democrats’ standing in the House. But all three have passed on re-election in pursuit of statewide offices, and Republicans hope to win back their battleground seats.

• Their suburban districts in Michigan (Slotkin), Virginia (Spanberger), and California (Porter) represent a small slice of the electoral map, but could be meaningful in deciding who controls the House. Jonathan Tamari outlines what’s at stake. Read more.

The WHITE HOUSE can spend $1.4 billion earmarked for the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border to acquire land for the project, a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled yesterday.

• The clarification came over objections from Texas and Missouri, which argued that the money appropriated by Congress is for the limited purpose of building the wall and that land acquisitions should be covered by other streams. Read more.

State laws that sidestep the 2017 TAX LAW’s limit on SALT deductions are bringing down the revenue gained from the cap, complicating congressional efforts to use it to fund tax cut extensions. Read more.

TICKETMASTER is under scrutiny by a lawmaker who wants regulators to take a closer look at a previously redacted report that alleges the platform undermined competition to boost profits. Read more.

House Oversight Chair JAMES COMER wants BIDEN to appear before the panel to testify in its impeachment probe surrounding the president’s family business dealings. Read more.

People, Power, and Politics

BGOV’s annual look at lobbying is nearly here . Last year presented challenges for those making their living advocating for clients on Capitol Hill—but the federal influence industry still logged over $4 billion in revenue. Bloomberg Government examined those numbers and some trends. Watch for the annual report out Monday.

VOTERS alleging recently redrawn North Carolina state Senate districts unlawfully dilute Black voting power weren’t entitled to a preliminary injunction barring the new maps, the Fourth Circuit said. Read more.

Defense & Foreign Affairs

BIDEN said ARAB COUNTRIES were prepared to “FULLY RECOGNIZE ISRAEL” in a future deal, as he and his Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama pushed back on critics of his Middle East policies at a campaign event yesterday. Read more.

US MILITARY officials and their ISRAELI counterparts have discussed only “broad concepts” about how to limit harm to civilians during a planned operation in Rafah, according to the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• A planned visit to Washington by Israeli officials in days will help the US “understand their concept” of the operation and offer “alternative opportunities” to minimize deaths, Gen. Charles Brown said. Read more.

The State of the Economy

The FDIC updated bank merger guidelines for the first time seek to ban noncompete clauses in contracts when banks are eyeing deals, extending Biden’s focus on labor market competition. Read more.

HOTELS that use algorithms to set the price of rooms are violating antitrust laws, the Justice Department and FTC argued in their latest move against algorithmic price-fixing. Read more.

SAM BANKMAN-FRIED got dozens of letters from family and friends supporting a sentence more lenient than the 25 years in prison he was dealt, but they didn’t appear to move the needle much. Read more.

What Else We’re Watching

The TRANSPORTATION DEPARTMENT is providing $60 million in immediate funding for emergency work following the collapse this week of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. Read more.

A BATTLE over the country’s NUCLEAR WASTE is likely to reach the Supreme Court after appellate court rulings that split on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s authority, a developers said. Read more.

The adoption of a type of LOW-CARBON CEMENT that has gained the support of the Biden administration could stop 16 million tons of carbon from being emitted, an energy efficiency group said. Read more.

To contact the reporters on this story: Brandon Lee in Washington at blee@bgov.com; Jeannie Baumann in Washington at jbaumann@bloombergindustry.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kayla Sharpe at ksharpe@bloombergindustry.com; Giuseppe Macri at gmacri@bgov.com