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The Business of Buying American: Public Procurement as Trade Strategy

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Review of International Political Economy 13:5 December 2006: 701–724

The business of buying American: Public

procurement as trade strategy in the USA
Linda Weiss
Discipline of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney,
Sydney NSW 2006, Australia

and

Elizabeth Thurbon
School of Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales

ABSTRACT
For all its importance as a policy tool around the globe, the study of public
procurement has barely begun. The role of government purchasing in trade
strategy, in particular, has been virtually ignored in the international politi-
cal economy literature. We argue that government procurement increasingly
serves as a weapon in the US arsenal of tools for sponsoring national champi-
ons, for securing the domestic front against foreign competitors, and for pro-
moting exports via the penetration of foreign procurement markets. Whilst
vigorously pressing for enlargement of procurement markets, the US is dis-
tinctive in having the most aggressive ‘buy national’ programs, which are en-
shrined in law and enforced in both formal and informal ways. Also at odds
with its own liberal dictates, government procurement in the US involves
a considerable amount of proactive state involvement and government–
business cooperation.

KEYWORDS
Trade strategy; United States; government procurement; Buy America Act;
state activism; government–business cooperation.

1. INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, the US has worked relentlessly through multilateral
and bilateral channels to extend the coverage of international trade rules
into domestic regulatory domains, from intellectual property protection
to quarantine controls and foreign investment regulation.1 In articulating
Review of International Political Economy
ISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online
C 2006 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk
DOI: 10.1080/09692290600950597
 R E V I E W O F I N T E R N AT I O N A L P O L I T I C A L E C O N O M Y

the desirability of ‘harmonising’ domestic regulations with ‘international’

rules, US policymakers have drawn heavily on the language of com-
petitive liberalism; the promotion of openness, transparency, and non-
discrimination in order to secure a level playing field for US firms in foreign
markets.2
The arena of Government Procurement is illustrative of this discursive
trend. According to US policymakers, American firms are currently disad-
vantaged in foreign government procurement (GP) markets by a host of
formal and informal rules aimed at privileging domestic firms, from the
subsidising of local companies to the placing of onerous ‘offset’ require-
ments on foreign firms, from bureaucratic red tape to cultural preferences
for local goods and services. Unable to compete in such a discriminatory en-
vironment, US firms are unfairly missing out on their fair share of lucrative
GP contracts—contracts that they would arguably be winning if permitted
to compete on a level playing field. Such unfairness is compounded by the
fact that the US itself is dutifully adhering to such norms as a member of the
WTO-GPA and various other regional and bilateral agreements, granting
signatories reciprocal access to America’s own GP market. If America can
bite the bullet and accept a healthy dose of foreign competition at home,
why should not others be encouraged to do the same? So run conventional
US arguments for stronger international regulations on ‘openness’, ‘trans-
parency’ and ‘non-discrimination’ in government procurement; a cursory
glance at the website of the Federal Government’s procurement-oriented
Advocacy Centre will dispel any doubt.
But how readily do America’s own government procurement policies
square with the injunctions of competitive liberalism? We argue that the
framing of government procurement issues in the language of competitive
liberalism obscures the more strategic dimension of public purchasing pol-
icy in the US. In fact, we propose that GP increasingly serves as a weapon
in the US arsenal of tools for strengthening national champions and for
protecting the domestic front whilst simultaneously promoting the pen-
etration of foreign markets by US firms. Moreover, and again somewhat
at odds with liberal dictums, we show that government procurement in
the US involves a considerable amount of proactive state involvement and
government–business cooperation.
An obvious question thus arises: how does the US reconcile these con-
flicting tendencies of internationalism versus nationalism—of driving re-
ciprocal market opening abroad, while emphasising and privileging ‘Buy
American’ at home? Our analysis of GP in America highlights these op-
posing tendencies and how the US has sought to manage them. But the
most significant contribution of this paper—to the field of IPE at least—is
its focus on, and serious treatment of, a neglected aspect of trade strategy—
government procurement—and its evolving relevance in an era of increas-
ing economic openness.
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Given the scarcity of IPE literature on GP’s significance as a tool of na-

tional economic promotion, we begin with a discussion of GP’s historic role
as an instrument of industrial policy, whilst highlighting the neglected face
of public purchasing as a component of trade strategy. An examination of
the peculiarities of the American case follows in which the incongruities of
the procurement principles espoused and the policies followed are high-
lighted. Discussion then focuses on the use of GP as a component of trade
strategy in the United States—specifically the use of GP to promote exports
on one hand and to protect and upgrade domestic industry on the other.
Finally, we consider the implications of our analysis for debates about US
trade policy and its conceptual underpinnings.

2 . T H E I P E OF T R A D E A N D D E V E L O P M E N T: B R I N G I N G
G OV E R N M E N T P R O C U R E M E N T I N
Government procurement (GP) refers to the public purchase of goods and
services from the private sector. In spite of privatisation and the popu-
lar idea that we live in an era of small government, procurement budgets
nonetheless remain steady or rising in the developed world. For the in-
dustrialized world, civilian procurement consumes an estimated annual
average of 10–15 percent of GDP, though in many industrial countries,
government purchases of goods and services can reach 20 percent of GDP
(in US, Europe, Canada). For most nations, procurement policy entails op-
timising the public means of purchasing in the service of national goals and
the public interest. Thus, ‘Governments typically wield their purchases as
a policy tool, favouring domestic over foreign suppliers. By doing so, they
aim to return tax money to domestic residents, create more jobs at home,
and reduce imports’ (Miyagiwa, 1991: 1320).
Governments have traditionally deployed their purchasing power as a
tool for developing a domestic industry and national infrastructure—from
the railways and highways of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the
information and communications superhighways of the twenty-first cen-
tury. In high-technology sectors where governments may initially be the
most significant purchaser of a commodity (such as aircraft, telecommuni-
cations equipment, software and computers), procurement policy has often
been used as a lever of trade policy to create national champions with an
edge in international markets. Even under the stricter trading regime of the
WTO, procurement offers arguably one of the few significant policy tools
remaining to governments, both central and regional, to foster domestic
industry development without falling foul of the multilateral rules.3
Yet for all its importance as a policy tool around the globe, the study of
public procurement has barely begun. The role of government purchasing
in trade strategy, in particular, has been virtually ignored in the interna-
tional political economy literature.4 Our interest in procurement policy lies
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both in the role it may play as an instrument of trade policy more gener-
ally and, in particular, as an illustration of a close government–business
relationship emerging across the US economic landscape in response to
heightened competitive pressures from abroad. Like several other policy
instruments—such as patenting and intellectual property (IP) regulation,
antidumping and trade remedies, food aid and farm subsidies, public pur-
chasing policy has long occupied an important place in US domestic devel-
opment and more recently in its global strategy. Both at home and overseas
it has led trade officials working in tandem with US industry to institute
new structures in order to penetrate foreign markets and to protect the
home base. Government procurement thus opens a window onto the co-
operative and coordinated character of US government–business relations,
as they both seek to limit foreign suppliers in the US market, and to displace
foreign competitors in foreign markets.5

A Key Policy Tool for Industry Development and Export Promotion

The contribution of public purchasing to industry development is more
widely acknowledged than its place in trade strategy. But the dividing
line between the two is often blurred. GP can function as an important
component of trade policy when used either to strengthen domestic players
or to block competitors in the home and foreign procurement markets.
Traditionally, in the US home market, GP has been used to nurture a
domestic industry to the point where it achieves an edge over foreign
competitors. Many governments have understood this process.6 However,
the US—with its legally enshrined Buy American programs—has demon-
strated more effectively than other nations (excepting perhaps France),
the tight nexus between government purchasing and the global growth
of national champions: Boeing, IBM, Lockheed, Caterpillar, Motorola are
but some of the household names which had their roots in government
contracting and continue to rank among the top government contractors.
Long-term procurement contracts together with government R&D pro-
vided the launch market essential to the take-off of the US computer in-
dustry, for example. Over 50 percent of IBM’s revenues in the 1950s came
from government contracts, offering a substantial, guaranteed market that
helped to push IBM to the head of the pack.7 As science and technology spe-
cialists have noted, ‘Military procurement and government-funded R&D
were big factors in the early post-war development of the U.S. electronics,
computer, and aircraft industries . . . ’ More generally, though, ‘(m)uch of
the stimulation given by defense to technology came through adventur-
ous procurement, not through funding of R&D’ (Branscomb 1993: 11; see
also Markusen, 1990: 152). A similar emphasis can be seen in new congres-
sional directives stipulating procurement of R&D funded products under
the Small Business Innovation Research program (Wessner, 2004: 59). As
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Borrus (1997) observes in his Congressional testimony, the US govern-

ment’s procurement of new technologies has been far more important for
corporate commercial success than its direct R&D sponsorship.
Even in maturity, top contractors such as Motorola, Honeywell, IBM,
Microsoft, EDS, and Boeing owe a substantial share of their market (and
revenue) to government purchasing policy (see Government Executive,
2005). Today, some 50–60 percent of Boeing’s sales are derived from pro-
curement contracts (Creswell, 2004). EDS, the giant electronic data systems
corporation, whose first major contracts came from government (to manage
Medicare insurance claims), could count on almost $400 million in federal
civilian contracts alone in 2004. In IT, US federal government spending for
2003–2005 will exceed $175 billion, the bulk of which ($95 billion) comes
from civilian procurement (Office of Management and Budget, 2005).
But procurement can also be used as a tool for export promotion in at
least two ways. The first is by nurturing local champions to the point where
procurement creates a robust domestic platform for global expansion. Ex-
amples abound—from computers and telecommunications to agricultural
machinery and aircraft. A recent example of how a US national champion
uses government contracts to leverage its position in foreign procurement
markets is the case of IT&E, recently awarded a multi-year General Services
Administration Management, Organizational and Business Improvement
Services contract from the US Government. The company, which provides
services connected with clinical research and regulation, underlined the
critical role of the procurement contract for its global expansion, empha-
sising how it would ‘[pave] the way for the company to step up the wide
range of services it offers to a variety of governmental agencies and insti-
tutions’ across the globe (Business Wire, 2004). By providing a secure home
market against foreign competition, procurement policy may thus help
firms finance their internationalisation strategy.
The second way in which procurement becomes a tool for export promo-
tion is more direct and involves the government–business coordinated pen-
etration of foreign procurement markets. When offered by foreign govern-
ments, procurement contracts can significantly enlarge the market for one’s
own firms. In the US, we shall see, market enlargement through foreign
procurement is being pursued aggressively and proactively through spe-
cial arrangements to coordinate the resources of government and business.

3. THE US PECULIARITY
An analysis of the US approach to public procurement serves to highlight
the special role that the US government has undertaken to play on two
fronts: no other state has been as globally active in driving open procure-
ment markets; and no other state has been as nationally protectionist in
legally mandating ‘buy national’ policies. On one hand, the US acts as the
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main driver to globalize government procurement markets and enlarge the

space for its own firms to operate by establishing the rules of the public pur-
chasing game; on the other, it maintains an aggressive buy national stance
which is expressed in an uncommonly tight set of rules that safeguard the
home procurement market for American firms.8
Thus, under the banner of greater transparency in government ten-
dering, the US has been the main driver globally of open procurement
markets—not only in successive multilateral rounds that culminated in
the WTO’s GPA,9 but also, especially, in regional and bilateral trade agree-
ments, where it has made the opening of GP markets of trading partners
a key negotiating objective (the most recent FTA with Australia being one
such example, elaborated later).
At the same time, however, the US has pursued a more aggressively
nationalist economic path in its GP policy. As we will show, since the Buy
American Act of 1933, the US federal government has mandated a core of
‘buy national’ programs, which require federal and state agencies to give
preference to domestically produced goods and services. Many govern-
ments throughout the world also exercise buy local preferences, especially
at regional and local levels. However, the US goes further in making Buy
American a legal requirement for its federal agencies (in addition to the
numerous and substantial buy local policies of its state governments).
As one of the rare comparative studies concluded, the United States
is ‘unique among industrial nations’ in its ‘buy national’ legislation. No
other developed country has such ‘explicit legislation regulating govern-
ment procurement practices’ (Miyagiwa, 1991: 1320). This is evidenced in
submissions to the WTO detailing procurement practices: unlike the US,
neither the Japanese, the Canadians, nor the EU places general or legal
restrictions on the place of origin or nationality of the supplier.10 Indeed
according to international law firm Pinsent Masons, far from allowing Buy
National provisions, EU procurement directives are designed specifically to
‘prevent “buy national” policies’.11 The main point is not that buy national
preferences are absent in Europe (or elsewhere), but rather that the differ-
ent systems are designed to produce different outcomes. European rules
are designed to make widespread discrimination much harder. American
rules are designed to make discrimination easier—as detailed analysis will
show. Tellingly, even laissez-faire Britain is now turning to the US for lessons
in how to link procurement to development of IT capability among British
firms (DTI, 2003). Equally significant is that when preparing for accession
to the WTO, China turned to the US, not Europe, for lessons in how to
safeguard its domestic procurement markets (Guangnan, 2004). However,
unlike the US, China’s procurement laws passed in 2002 do not legislate
for mandatory purchase of Chinese goods; rather, they allow for preferential
treatment for domestic firms in procurement in certain areas (most notably
in software).12
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It is reasonable to expect that international differences in regulatory ap-

proach would lend themselves to different outcomes. Precise figures are
difficult to obtain in this under-investigated field, but there is plenty of
suggestive evidence that the effect of a mandatory Buy American policy
is substantial, significantly curtailing US government procurement of im-
ports. The foreign share of the US procurement market has been estimated
as 2 percent—a figure which by any reckoning must be deemed paltry.
Moreover, the fact that the US has not sought to amend this estimate, cou-
pled with its unusual reluctance to comply with WTO reporting require-
ments on procurement, and the increasing use of non-competitive tender-
ing under President Bush (US House of Representatives, 2004), would tend
to lend credibility to such a figure. It must be said that other governments
have also been found to discriminate in favour of domestic suppliers. But
it is noteworthy that the list of complaints and criticisms targeting US prac-
tices by Canada, Japan, and the EU are a good deal more extensive and wide
ranging than those by the US of its trading partners (European Commis-
sion, 2003; USTR, 2005). For example, while the US complains only of barri-
ers to contracts for Japan’s public works (USTR, 2005), Japan complains of
widespread discrimination against foreign products emanating from the
BAA, from the US Appropriations Act, from the Surface Transportation
Assistance Act governing mass transit, and from the ever-widening reach
of ‘national security’ exemptions which have increasingly excluded com-
petitive tendering (METI, 2004). The EU’s more extensive list notes the US
lack of reciprocity in requiring GPA signatories for each contract to seek in-
dividual waivers from the BAA, rather than granting them automatically,
and for shrouding the appeals process in ‘mystery’ (European Commis-
sion, 2003). As our analysis will show, American procurement policy is
difficult to justify in the language of ‘foreign unfairness’, which has rou-
tinely served as the favoured official justification for protectionist measures
in the United States.

4 . P R O C U R E M E NT A S T R A D E S T R AT E G Y I : O P E N I N G
GP MARKETS ABROAD
The US has a well-documented history of pursuing the opening of for-
eign GP markets through multilateral channels, playing a central role in
the drafting of the 1979 GATT Government Procurement Agreement,13 the
1994 WTO Government Procurement Agreement,14 and the establishment
of the Working Group on Transparency in Government Procurement un-
der the 1996 Singapore Ministerial Declaration (Blank and Marceau, 1997).
However, it is America’s negotiation of bilateral trade agreements that
demonstrates most clearly its GP-linked trade strategy: the use of procure-
ment to expand market access abroad whilst simultaneously protecting the
home front. This strategy can be conceptualized in three basic steps, which
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we consider briefly in turn:

(i) bringing non WTO-GPA members ‘in from the cold’ via bilateral FTAs,
thus automatically expanding market access for US firms;
(ii) implanting ‘American friendly’ GP rules in foreign markets to privi-
lege US firms abroad; and
(iii) extracting maximum market access concessions from negotiating part-
ners for minimum cost.

(i) Bringing non WTO-GPA members ‘in from the cold’

via bilateral FTAs
When entering into bilateral agreements with non WTO-GPA members,
the US generally insists on the inclusion of GP issues, which automatically
expands market access for American firms.15 One can reasonably assume
that this inclusion is made reluctantly by non-GPA members; if a country
believed there was anything to be gained from granting reciprocal access
to its procurement market, it would simply accede to the GPA. Yet the
refusal by so many countries to do just that indicates a widely-held belief
that the costs associated with GPA accession far outweigh the benefits, not
least because it involves the de-linking of GP from industry development
initiatives. Indeed, international scepticism of the GPA runs so deep that
non-membership is the norm in the international trade arena (of the WTO’s
148 members, only 37 have signed the GPA).
Bilateral negotiations with the US however mean accommodating con-
cessions that cannot be obtained in a multilateral forum, hence the in-
ability of non-GPA members to keep procurement off the table. The 2004
Australia–US FTA is illustrative. Australia refused to join the WTO GPA
on the grounds that losses for local firms domestically would far outweigh
any reciprocal market access gains. In its one-on-one negotiations with
the USA, however, Australia’s resolve to protect GP was broken. Under
the AUSFTA, Australia expands already significant market access for US
firms by agreeing to abandon all preferential policies for supporting do-
mestic industry development—including the only program that mandated
GP as a policy tool for developing domestic capability (in the IT sector).16
Moreover, it agreed to do so in exchange for nothing more than it would
have received from the US had it acceded to the WTO GPA (the right to
compete for US GP contracts alongside firms from the 36 GPA member
countries). The same story can be told for Chile which, despite rejecting
the WTO GPA, agreed to bilaterally open its GP markets to US firms on a
non-discriminatory basis, whilst abandoning all offset requirements that
would link the award of GP contracts to industry development. What these
two examples indicate is that the US employs bilateral trade agreements
with weaker partners to pry open otherwise restricted foreign procurement
markets, thereby expanding market access for US firms. This brings us to
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the second step in America’s GP trade strategy: implanting American-

friendly GP rules abroad to favour US firms.

(ii) Implanting ‘American friendly’ rules in foreign GP markets

The Australian experience again serves to illustrate the US strategy of mar-
ket enlargement by implanting American-style rules that work chiefly to
the advantage of its own firms. Under the AUSFTA, the Australian govern-
ment was required to reverse a trend in procurement regulation that had
shifted from rigid process and procedure controls to a more cost-effective
system of prescribing the outcomes to be achieved. The Australian empha-
sis on ‘best value for money for the Commonwealth Government’, using
tax dollars to support domestic industry, jobs, and innovation, has now
been supplanted by emphasis on American-friendly process and proce-
dure (Brennan and Hodges, 2004: 14). Thus, the new rules specified in
Article 5 of Chapter 15:
(a) increase opportunities for US bidders with more open tendering, thus
setting aside local supplier arrangements;
(b) give US tenderers more time to prepare bids (via the new requirement
for Australian government agencies to publish an annual procurement
plan 12 months in advance);
(c) mandate all tender advertising through one agency to smooth the path
for US bidders; and
(d) establish new mechanisms to deal with complaints from unsuccessful
tenderers.
To render these stringent demands more palatable, the US invokes
greater ‘transparency’ as the overarching goal. Yet this seems misleading
when US firms have long captured a generous share of Australian procure-
ment, especially in ITC (and the lion’s share of defence procurement)—
none of which has been reciprocated: Australian firms have long been
excluded from the US market. The bilateral deal technically removes the
legal barrier to US markets, but in practice tilts the playing field much
further by ensuring a bigger share of the Australian procurement market
for US firms. As mentioned, it achieves this by stipulating removal of all
offset conditions that require winning tenderers to source local inputs or
upgrade technology, conditions designed to stimulate local capabilities in
Australian industry.17
These new priorities will be enforced by a new mechanism for challeng-
ing and overturning GP contracts in the courts, if deemed not to meet the
new rules. Henceforth, GP decisions in Australia will take place under the
threat of legal challenge from US firms with deep pockets and aggressive
habits. Chile was similarly compelled to agree to such provisions in its FTA
with the USA, as were Morocco and Bahrain. While these countries have
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also won the right to challenge the award of US contracts in American

courts, the likelihood of much smaller Australian (or Chilean or Moroc-
can) firms launching an effective challenge against the US government in
its own legal system—let alone sustaining the costs—must be considered
marginal. Even if such a case were launched, the apparent bias of American
legal institutions towards US firms (demonstrated later in the case of Cray
versus NEC) would very likely render such challenges fruitless.

(iii) Extracting maximum market access concessions from negotiating

partners for minimum cost
Once a country has agreed to enter into a government procurement agree-
ment with the United States (multilaterally through the GPA or bilaterally
through an FTA) American negotiators have proved highly effective in ex-
tracting far more market access concessions than they give away. The basic
US strategy here is getting trade partners to dump their ‘buy national’
preferences whilst effectively guarding their own. Instead of relinquishing
buy national rules, the US agrees to grant a ‘waiver’ for foreign firms from
Buy American legislation. The genius lies in the catch: waivers still remain
bound by and subject to US laws (such as permanent Small Business Set
Asides18 ), administrative decisions not to use open tendering (rampant un-
der Bush’s tenure), and regulations (which create new restrictions). Such
new restrictions can be imposed on an annual basis by Congress through
the appropriations process. Recent history has shown that when a new US
Federal Department’s Annual Budget Appropriation Act is introduced, it
will frequently include specific justifications for the exclusive purchase of
American goods, effectively negating the waiver principle, or at least lay-
ing it open to legal challenge by American firms through US-friendly courts
or Congressional lobbying (see Congress Daily, 2003; Murphy, 2001). The
result is that BA preferences continue to prevail despite the in-principle
existence of waivers. Thus, a recent EU report on American trade barri-
ers concludes that the implementation of waivers is shrouded by ‘legal
uncertainty’, the existence of waivers by no means necessarily translating
into improved market access for European firms (European Commission,
2003). An American procurement insider concludes more forcefully that
the Buy American Act ‘represent[s] one of the most visible and egregious
remnants of U.S. protectionism. Its very existence refutes the U.S. desire to
only “level the playing field” in international trade’ (Smyth, 1999).
In sum, the US approach to negotiating bilateral GP agreements—
bringing countries in from the cold, implanting US friendly rules to advan-
tage American firms, and extracting maximum market access concessions
for minimum cost—is indicative of the more general strategic deployment
of GP policies to expand market access abroad whilst protecting the home
front.
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5 . P R O C U R E M E N T A S T R A D E S T R AT E G Y I I :
P E N E T R AT I N G G P M A R K E T S
The US appears unique in its aggressive pursuit of overseas procurement
contracts to the extent that very few countries enjoy a coordinated or insti-
tutionalized approach to assisting firms in the pre- and post-tender stage of
foreign procurement. America’s distinctive approach to helping US firms
bid for (and win) foreign GP contracts dates back to 1992 when the Clinton
administration designated export advocacy as a ‘high priority area’ of its
National Export Strategy. Under the 1992 National Export Promotion Act,
19 federal departments and agencies were reorganized to create a high-
level coordinating body, the Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee
(TPCC), as well as a new agency within the Department of Commerce,
the Advocacy Center, and an Advocacy Network—all with the mission of
helping US corporations win procurement contracts in overseas markets,
and mobilising the financial and other resources of government necessary
to the task.

A proactive and coordinated approach

Proudly known colloquially as the ‘War Room’, the Advocacy Center dif-
fers from other government export-promotion agencies in being created
expressly for the purpose of advocating for US firms in foreign procure-
ment and imbued with a mission to intervene proactively (as well as reac-
tively) to secure foreign contracts for US companies. Dozens of specialists
in aerospace, banking, computers, energy and so forth closely monitor
projects ‘up to five years ahead’ critically drawing on secret information
about foreign competitors gleaned from a dense network of intelligence
sources, including the CIA and surveillance technology (Campbell, 2001;
Malkin, 1995).19 In official discourse, the Center’s role is simply ‘to level
the playing field for US products and services abroad’. Its task is to help
US exporters resolve problems such as: foreign competitors receiving gen-
erous assistance from their own governments; unfair treatment by foreign
government decision makers; and politicized procurement processes (link-
ing contracts to aid or other sweeteners).20 The Center assists in the form
of ‘a timely letter to a decision maker in a foreign government, phone
calls to well-placed foreign government officials . . . [arranging] meetings
between foreign officials and U.S. embassy or CS personnel, and [schedul-
ing] cabinet- or subcabinet-level trade missions to countries in question’.
Advocacy Center support depends on the extent to which the proposed ex-
port is deemed to be in the US national interest (measured against various
quantifiable criteria).21
In addition to the Advocacy Center, other trade-related agencies have
launched their own initiatives to give US companies a stronger (in official
parlance, ‘fairer’) chance to win foreign contracts, including support for
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project development with front-end engineering and design (FEED) or

feasibility studies (the Trade and Development Agency, TDA) and early
promises of financial backing (The EX-IM Bank). As Commerce Secretary
Evans explained, ‘Demonstrating the likelihood of financing early in the
procurement process and providing technical assistance that sets speci-
fications for particular projects [i.e. that sets US specifications] create a
competitive advantage for the country sponsoring these supports’.22 Un-
der the purview of the TPCC, the Advocacy Center coordinates assistance
from some 18 other agencies, including the CIA, to secure foreign contracts
for US firms.
The campaign to help US firm ICF Kaiser secure a Czech government
contract to modernize the Nova Hutt steel facility is just one illustration
among many of how advocacy works to clinch the deal. The $262 million
bid, launched in 1994, was successfully concluded in 1997, but not be-
fore the full weight of the US international trade administration had been
brought to bear. In 1994, the US TDA stepped in to fund ICF Kaiser’s feasi-
bility study for the project. This financial leg-up was backed by ‘continuous
business counseling and advocacy support’ (coordinated by the Advocacy
Center) throughout the three years of negotiations involving all levels of
the US administration, from the Secretary of Commerce and the US Am-
bassador to the Czech Republic, to the US Central and Eastern European
Business Information Center. Finally, when a financing set-back looked set
to scuttle the deal, the US Secretary of Commerce placed a personal call to
the Czech Minister of Industry and Trade, which led to a favourable and
expeditious outcome.23
In another instance, the Advocacy Center was called upon to coordinate
support for US firm Chester Engineers, which was facing competition from
two Japanese companies in its bid to secure a Taiwanese wastewater re-
cycling contract in 1996. Both Japanese firms—according to the Advocacy
Center—were receiving financial support from their own government, giv-
ing them an unfair advantage over Chester. So, to help ‘level the playing
field’, the Advocacy Center arranged for attractive financing terms through
the EX-IM bank to make Chester’s bid more enticing. It then arranged for
an advocacy letter from Commerce Assistant Secretary to the President of
the Taiwanese procurer, a visit to the procuring firm’s Chairman by the Ad-
vocacy Center’s Project Manager, and on-the-ground support for Chester
from the American Institute in Taiwan to help them pitch their bid. Chester
was swiftly awarded the contract.
Such accounts necessarily exclude all reference to the routine use of intel-
ligence agents and spying technology to gain a run on foreign competitors.
While such coordinated efforts were institutionalized under Clinton, the
Bush administration has maintained a firm commitment to what it calls
‘aggressive advocacy’, following a pattern of chalking up the Center’s
‘successes’ as laid down in the first 100 days of Bush’s Presidency (ITA,
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2002). More recently, in 2003 the Center established ‘Team China’, a group
of advocacy experts in Washington and Beijing devoted to assisting US
firms bidding for Chinese contracts. As well as having a direct line to the
Secretary of Commerce, the Team liaises on a daily basis with the Special
Counsel to the Secretary of Commerce stationed in Beijing (China Business
Review, 2005).
America’s strategic approach to helping US firms win foreign GP con-
tracts sets it apart from its trading rivals. While most countries display a
well-developed system of export promotion (insurance, credit agencies),
that is accessible to firms after contracts are secured, none of those most
active in procurement markets or perceived as US rivals have an agency
dedicated to proactively identifying and coordinating bid efforts prior to
and throughout the tender process. Instead, such lobbying is left to the
discretion of individual politicians on a bid-to-bid basis. These observa-
tions are borne out by an examination of the French and German export
promotion regime, the two countries the US reports as its most active rivals
in foreign procurement markets (see, e.g. GAO, 1995).

6 . P R O C U R E M E N T A S T R A D E S T R AT E G Y I I I :
P R OT E C T I N G T H E H O M E F R O N T
Among the GPA signatories, the US has no equal in the extent to which
it preserves the home market against foreign incursions. Here the Buy
American principle—both as legal and social norm—offers a robust form
of protection. While other governments also exercise buy local preferences,
especially at regional and local levels, the US goes further than most in
mandating Buy American and making this a legal requirement for its federal
agencies.
As noted earlier, under the GPA, trade partners who give the US access
to their procurement market, in theory, have the provisions of the Buy
American Act waived. However, there is compelling evidence to suggest
that the US remains a tightly held procurement market, with relatively few
openings to foreigners compared with its size. At least two major obstacles
to an open procurement market in the US deserve highlighting: the nu-
merous buy national programs that skirt the GP agreements through legal
and technical loopholes; and informal barriers via the pervasive operation
of Buy American norms in government agencies. We discuss each of these
obstacles in turn.

(i) ‘Buy American’ as legal requirement

The ‘Buy American’ Act was passed on March 3, 1933, as part of a broad
range of legislation in response to the great depression. In the intervening
years, the US federal government has mandated a core of ‘buy national’
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programs, which require federal and state agencies to give preference to

domestically produced goods and services. Over the course of 70 years,
the BA Act has undergone several amendments, successively strength-
ening existing provisions. Currently, it restricts government purchases of
supplies to those defined as ‘domestic-end-products’. Suppliers have to
meet a two-part test: (1) the article must be manufactured in the US and
(2) the cost of domestic components must exceed 50 percent of the cost of
all components.
Under the WTO GPA, foreign firms from signatory countries are granted
‘waivers’ from the Buy American clauses. However, as noted earlier, nu-
merous mechanisms provide escape routes from the waiver principle; this
helps explain why the estimated share of foreign firms in US government
contracts is a paltry 2 percent. In spite of the low penetration of foreign sup-
pliers, support for the BA law remains as strong as ever within the political
elite and in many government circles. That support is reflected in current
moves to strengthen BA legislation in the Buy American Improvement Act.
Under the proposed provisions of the BAIA currently before the Senate the
exercise of waivers for trading partners would become even more difficult.
To take just one example, each agency would need to file annual reports
with Congress, providing itemized lists of all BA waivers, dollar values,
and sources—a requirement that appears to be crafted in full knowledge
that agencies would find such a requirement so burdensome as to avoid
giving out contracts to foreign suppliers in the first place. Additional tem-
porary legislation directly outlawing Federal government outsourcing of
job contracts offshore (largely aimed against IT outsourcing) merely em-
phasizes the breadth and depth of Buy American sentiment and its historic
role in preserving US employment and high-technology capabilities.

(ii) ‘Buy American’ as national norm

In addition to the legislative barriers and restrictions detailed earlier, pow-
erful normative barriers preserve America’s GP market for Americans. A
number of peculiarities in American GP practices point to the influence of
such norms, including:
• limited foreign penetration of the US GP market;
• collaborative efforts to fend off foreign competitors in the domestic mar-
ket;
• the sidelining of procedural fairness and transparency to favour national
champions; and
• the prevalence of ‘Made in America’ language in private-sector bidding
practices.

Limited foreign penetration. One indicator of the power and pervasiveness

of Buy American norms is the fact that only a very tiny proportion of
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American GP contracts go to foreigners. One estimate, from the Canadian

Commercial Corporation, based on a US General Services Administration
report for 1999, puts the figure as low as 2 percent.24 Exact figures are hard
to come by, since this is one datum that the federal government appears
reluctant to disclose to the WTO. Under Article XIX: 5 of the GPA, all
parties are obliged to collect and provide to the GPA Committee on an
annual basis, statistics on relevant procurements undertaken by that Party.
To the extent possible, statistics must also be provided on the country of
origin of products and services purchased. The US procurement data, so
comprehensive in most other respects, does not make public the share of
US and foreign suppliers in procurement. In fact, the US has not reported
on procurement since 1999, and none of its reports provide information
on the country of origin of its suppliers. By contrast, reports submitted
by Switzerland, Norway, Hong Kong and Japan have always included
information on country or region of supplier’s origin, and Korea met all
reporting obligations and submitted details of country of origin for all
GPA affected procurements in 2002.25 It is tempting to conclude from the
striking absence of relevant data on this particular issue that the US does
not have much to boast about and is not living up to its own demands for
transparency.26 Whether the 2 percent figure is correct or not, it seems safe
to conclude that US procurement from foreign sources is marginal.

Collaborative efforts to fend off foreign competitors at home. The case of su-
percomputers offers an instructive example of the extent to which the US
government and its national champions work together to fend off foreign
competitors. The 1995 Cray–NEC antidumping dispute was the most dra-
matic in a series of trade frictions between Japanese and American super-
computer producers which trace back to the 1980s.27 This saw America’s
market leader in the supercomputer industry, Cray Research, working with
key US government agencies—chiefly the Department of Commerce (Inter-
national Trade Commission), but also the Courts of Appeal of the Federal
Circuit (CAFC) and Congress—to prevent a major US procurement tender
from going to a Japanese supplier, NEC.
In 1996, the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR),
funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF), accepted NEC’s
bid to provide the Center with four supercomputers over five years. Almost
as soon as NEC’s bid was accepted, Cray (the unsuccessful bidder) filed an
antidumping petition, charging NEC with a 454 percent dumping margin.
The case has a number of unusual aspects, all which serve to highlight the
Buy American bias that permeates all levels of the US government.
To begin, the contracting agency UCAR maintained all along that
NEC had won the contract fairly on the basis of demonstrated supe-
rior performance. In a hearing testimony, UCAR confirmed that the NEC
material ‘offered and demonstrated overwhelmingly superior technical
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performance and low risk relative to Cray Research’ and that Cray ‘lost this
procurement because of unacceptable technical risk’ in their offer.28 Never-
theless, the US government immediately sided with its national champion;
Congress pronounced NEC guilty of dumping and threatened UCAR with
a suspension of funding unless it cancelled the NEC deal all before a dump-
ing investigation had taken place.
Still more bizarre, when a formal investigation finally took place, NEC
was found guilty and penalized for dumping even though the actual sale
to NCAR never went through, and even though proof of injury to the peti-
tioner Cray was never determined (and was later denied by the petitioner
Cray’s subsequent owner, SGI). Moreover, the dumping margins imposed
were the largest on record: 454, 173.08 and 313.54 percent on NEC, Fujitsu
and the other Japanese supercomputers, respectively.29
The last point draws attention to the way US institutions discriminate
against foreign rivals. In the NEC case, the final margins were determined
by the DOC through the ‘Facts Available’ (FA) method. One of four different
methods for determining dumping margins, the FA method is notorious
for its unfairness in that the facts are those usually supplied by the peti-
tioner: thus the dumping margin determined by the DOC was the same
as Cray had petitioned for: 454 percent. The margins are, accordingly, al-
ways extremely high,30 and the FA method has never been known to find
a negative case! NEC (and the other Japanese companies) were offered the
opportunity to dispute the facts supplied by the petitioner by complying
with the DOC’s demands, but one by one withdrew from the DOC investi-
gation owing to three unacceptable conditions: (i) the onerous information
requirements—most of it of a highly sensitive commercial nature; (ii) the
fact that such information would be handed over to the competitor’s ally—
the DOC, perceived as a ‘biased’ party;31 and (iii) the need to do so under
tight time constraints.
Dismayed with the process, NEC appealed to the CAFC. But the CAFC
rallied in favour of the US side against the foreign respondent by invoking
impossibly high standards of proof. Despite finding that Commerce’s in-
terference in the UCAR procurement had been designed to assist Cray, ‘the
Court nonetheless ruled against NEC on the grounds that it was unable
to prove that Commerce’s mind was “irrevocably closed” on the issue of
dumping’.32
NEC for its part had long ‘suspected Cray of using the dumping charges
to bolster the company’s steadily declining sales of vector supercomputers
in the face of decreased military and government procurement’ (Kallender,
2001). Ironically, this suspicion was strengthened several years later when
Cray revoked its dumping petition and entered into an agreement with its
former nemesis to act as the sole OEM distributor of NEC computers in
North America. (Cray, with its markets shrinking, was soon taken over by
Silicon Graphics Inc. [SGI] which in turn sold Cray to Tera Computer Co.,
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which then became Cray Inc., in 2000.) By that stage, Cray had become
something of a shell, with few products and little to offer other than ‘its
exclusive sales channels and customer base’ (Kallender, 2001).
The Cray case demonstrates how the threat of foreign incursion may
serve to mobilize key federal agencies and authorities in the cause of safe-
guarding the home market for American industry. In particular, it shows
how government and business are willing collaborators in the game of min-
imising participation of foreign rivals in lucrative domestic procurement
opportunities. Far from being an isolated example, the supercomputer case
joins a long line of GP disputes that span almost two decades of US high-
tech rivalry with Japan.

The sidelining of procedural fairness and transparency to favour national champi-

ons. The Boeing 767 tanker deal offers a compelling illustration not only of
the extent to which Buy American preferences are entrenched in the public
culture and how, under certain conditions, these may override not only
procedural fairness and the rules of transparent tendering, but also of how
considerations of merit may be sidelined to favour the national champion.
The incident in question concerns the favouring of Boeing—nurtured by
public purchasing programs and heavily dependent on the procurement
market—over and above the more competitive bid of its European arch
rival, Airbus. The case has gained much publicity over the past two years
or so, not only because of the value of the contracts involved, but also
because of the mendacity of the procurement agency and top level pub-
lic officials who simply ignored competitive tendering and ‘transparency’
obligations, including issues of merit, in their determination to favour Boe-
ing at all costs.33
In 2001, the US Air Force developed a draft Operational Requirements
Document (ORD) specifying through 26 criteria what it required of its new
tanker aircraft (to provide mid-air refuelling). Instead of then calling for
tenders, however, the Air Force passed the ORD over to Boeing and gave
the company five months to rewrite the official specs so that it could se-
cure the $23.5 billion contract. In spite of Boeing being unable to meet 19 of
the 26 original capabilities required—including the specification that the
new tankers be at least as effective as the 40-year-old ones that they would
replace—the Air Force nonetheless accepted the rewritten proposal to con-
tain costs. Boeing’s competitor Airbus was then given just 12 days to bid
on the project. The Airbus bid met more than 20 of the original 26 speci-
fications and came in at $10 billion below the Boeing price. Nevertheless,
the contract went to Boeing.
Subsequent emails between the various parties reveal strong support
for the Boeing deal at the highest levels; ultimately, the White House
intervened to ensure the deal went to Boeing; the agencies critical of the
deal for being too costly and not needed were thus instructed to move
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ahead. In this case, the bidding process was more or less designed from
the outset to exclude the foreign player. The Boeing tanker agreement—
currently suspended—thus illustrates how deeply Buy American norms
are entrenched in the culture. At the very least, the Boeing case provides
suggestive evidence that, especially when stakes are high, the Buy Amer-
ican preferences of public officials will trump strictly ‘procedural’ (‘best
bid’) considerations. Meanwhile, the prospect of awarding the contract to
European Airbus remains anathema to the US establishment. Regardless
of its exceptional undertakings, such as the proposal to partner with Boe-
ing or to set up production and maintain jobs in the United States, the
European rival finds the door firmly shut.
It should be emphasized that there is nothing in principle wrong with a
government favouring its own suppliers. The use of tax dollars to sustain
domestic production and employment can provide a strong rationale for
the kinds of actions witnessed in the Boeing story. What makes such action
remarkable and unacceptable for US trading partners, however, is when
it is underpinned by the stark absence of reciprocity—indeed, when it is
connected to a global strategy to require others to do unto you what you
will not do unto them.

The use of ‘Made in America’ rhetoric in private-sector bidding practices. Fi-

nally, the influence of BA norms and their influence as powerful exclusion-
ary (protective) barriers can also be seen even at the level of the private
sector. Perhaps as a result of the rapid spread of cross-border produc-
tion, such norms are increasingly shaping the strategy of firms in their bid
to secure government contracts. Recent examples include two American
companies—Sikorsky and Lockheed-Martin—in a year-long campaign,
each trying to win critical contracts by laying claim to being not more
competitive, but ‘more American’ than the other. While for firms the ap-
peal to ‘made-in-America’ and ‘all-American’ criteria is more opportunistic
than a sign of national loyalty, the fact that companies feel bound to make
such appeals at all is an indicator of the powerful resonance of BA norms
for the broader public and the need for firms to construct themselves as
all-American in order to compete—i.e. to appear as a worthy contestant
for government contracts.34 They are further testimony to the proposition
that BA norms are alive and flourishing in the American polity, powerfully
orienting the same authorities who enthusiastically wield the globalisation
language of free trade and open markets.

7. CONCLUSION
We draw three conclusions from this analysis. First, although subject to
multilateral discipline, government procurement offers a powerful tool
for national economic promotion in an era of economic openness. In the
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hands of the world’s superpower, government procurement has moved on

from being an important mechanism for nurturing national champions to
become a major instrument of trade policy. The ‘Buy American’ principles
at the core of US trade policy are part of a larger story that includes the use
of more widely analysed tools (such as antidumping and Section 301) in
pursuit of market enlargement abroad and market preservation at home.
Second, the federal government’s involvement in the promotion of
Buy American at home and abroad has resulted in considerable state
activism with a proactive and coordinated flavour—characteristics that
conflict with the image of a liberal market economy favoured by the US.
State activism in this context takes three main forms: market enlargement—
leading the drive to open international procurement markets; market
penetration—coordinating US-firm bids for foreign GP contracts; and market
preservation—preserving the home front for US suppliers against foreign
competitors. Thus, in foreign settings, the US government proudly pursues
‘aggressive advocacy’—bringing to bear vast intelligence against foreign
competitors in combination with the use of carrots (and occasionally sticks)
to land GP contracts for US firms; at home, on the other hand, the US rarely
deviates from its BA priorities, taking care to enshrine BA principles in law
and to counterbalance any scope for waivers of the rules with additional
legal obligations to ‘buy national’.
Third, US activism in GP markets serves to underline the opposing ten-
dencies of internationalism versus nationalism: on one hand, the federal
government strives to drive reciprocal market opening abroad while, on
the other hand, it emphasises market-preserving, Buy American principles
at home. This raises the question of how the US seeks to manage such ten-
sions. Since this is an issue that applies more generally to US trade policy,
it is one we take up in more depth elsewhere.35 What can be said in this
context, however, is that the US government has adopted a proactive and
strategic approach to matters of foreign trade generally, and procurement
in particular. Under the ideological banner of fighting foreign unfairness,
the State centred on Washington has become the willing collaborator of
the private sector, driving open foreign markets whilst at the same time
working to preserve the home front for US firms. Government procure-
ment has thus emerged as an important weapon in the arsenal of US trade
strategy. Despite the best discursive efforts of US policymakers, however,
this strategy has more in common with building national advantage than
supporting liberal internationalism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to acknowledge a Discovery Grant from the Australia Re-
search Council, which supported research for this project. Thanks are due to
three anonymous referees whose comments helped sharpen our argument.
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NOTES
1 These are often referred to as‘behind the border’ regulatory issues (World Bank,
2002).
2 A burgeoning literature exists on the politics of international harmonisation in
a range of regulatory arenas. Works focusing on the role of US policymakers
and business leaders in pushing for the international adoption of ‘US - friendly’
rules include: Drake and Nicolaidis (1992); Simmons (2001); Kapstein (1992);
Drahos and Braithwaite (2003); Sell (2003) and Weiss, Thurbon, and Mathews
(2004).
3 Under the WTO’s plurilateral Government Procurement Agreement, signa-
tories may carve out exemptions for all local government contracts and
for federal governments seeking to discriminate in favour of small - to -
medium sized domestic firms, The WTO’s 1996 Doha Declaration also rec-
ognized the importance of GP as an industrial promotion instrument in
developing countries and allowed for the continued use of GP for such
purposes (so long as norms of transparency were upheld). According to Para-
graph 26 of the Doha Declaration, GP negotiations with developing coun-
tries ‘shall be limited to the transparency aspects and therefore will not
restrict the scope for countries to give preferences to domestic supplies and
suppliers’.
4 Indeed, in the most influential political economy literature on ‘Strategic Trade
Policy’ in the United States, GP as a policy instrument barely rates a mention,
while most space is devoted to tariff, subsidy and R and D issues (see for
example Aggarwal et al. (1987); Milner and Yoffie (1989a, b).
5 Research in progress documents a broader US shift towards more collaborative
government–business relations in trade and technology policy as well.
6 For an overview of the role of GP in promoting the technological upgrading
of domestic industries in a variety of European countries see Rolfstam (2005).
Numerous case studies on the use of GP as tool for technological upgrading and
the creation of national champions in Europe have also been published under
the auspices of a European Commission - sponsored project on Innovation
Systems and European Integration. See Edquist et al. (1998).
7 Between 1949 and 1959, IBM was awarded almost $ 400 million in government
contracts (Hills, 1982).
8 Jenkins (1992:88) notes a similar contradiction in US investment policy.
9 Substantial amendments to the GATT Government Procurement Code which
pushed market opening much further in 1988, for example, were driven
through by the US. As the GATT Affairs Division of the US Department of
Commerce acknowledge, ‘The United States was successful in securing mul-
tilateral agreement on a group of amendments which were largely offered by
U.S. negotiators’ (Silberman, 1986: 16).
10 See ‘Communication from the United States: response to questionnaire
on government procurement of services’, World Trade Organisation, Doc-
ument Numbers S/WPGR/W/11/Add.6, 21 October 1996. Accessible at
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop e/gproc e/w11a6.wpf; For Canada, the
EU, and Japan, see Document N umbers S/WPGR/W/11/Add. 10, 2 De-
cember 1996, Accessible at http://www.wto.org/english/tratop e/gproc e/
w11a10.wpf; S/WPGR/W/11/Add.5, 27 September 1996, Accessible at http://
www.wto.org/english/tratop e/gproc e/w11a5.wpf; S/WPGR/W/11/Add.
7, 4 October 1996, Accessible at http://www.wto.org/english/tratop e/gproc
e/w11a7.wpf.

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11 ‘Public procurement law: the basics’, http://www.out - law.com/page - 5964.

12 Testimony of Benjamin H. Wu before the Committee on Govern-
ment Reform, 13 May 2005. Accessible at http:// www.technology.gov/
Testimony/p BHW 050513.htm.
13 The GATT Agreement accorded national treatment for the firms of the 12 sig-
natory countries in a limited number of sectors. (Service contracts, for example,
were excluded from the GATT procurement agreement.)
14 The WTO GPA currently has 37 signatories, most of which are developed coun-
tries.
15 Of the six recent bilateral FTAs that the US has negotiated with non - WTO GPA
members, five include provisions on Government Procurement (the Andes
being the exception). Countries signing up to bi - lateral GP coverage despite
reluctance to join the WTO GPA are Australia, Bahrain, Chile, The Central
American Dominican Republic, and Morocco.
16 DFAT (1997); Brennan (2004); Weiss et al. (2004).
17 Offsets mean any conditions which stipulate use of domestic content or sup-
plies, licensing of technology transfer, investment, counter trade or similar
actions to encourage local development.
18 Moreover, in view of the generous definition of what constitutes a ‘small’ firm
in the US—including firms employing up to 1,500 people, the ‘small business
exceptions’ clause offers a convenient escape route from foreign competition
for a large swathe of local firms.
19 By the end of the 1990s, the US administration claimed a gain of nearly $ 150
billion in exports as a result of deploying intelligence activity, including satellite
intercepts, against foreign companies (Campbell, 2001).
20 See ‘The Advocacy Center’s Mission’ at http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/
advocacy.
21 The Center’s website states that a bid is considered to be in the national interest
if the US content of the product to be provided exceeds 50 percent of the total
value. When US content is lower, other factors associated with US ownership
may be considered.
22 Testimony of Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans on Progress Implement-
ing the National Export Strategy before the Senate Committee on Banking,
Housing and Urban Affairs, 21 May 2003.
23 The Advocacy Center ‘Success Stories’, at http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/
advocacy/Icfkaise2.htm.
24 See http://www.ccc.ca/eng/images/content/markt research/market-us-
non-defence-procurement.html.
25 The collated information for each reporting country is available at
http://www.wto.org/english/tratop e/gproc e/gpstat e.htm.
26 Thomas (2000: 255–7) finds a similar reluctance regarding US reporting of sub-
sidies to the WTO.
27 Tyson (1993) and Anchordoguy (1994).
28 See Buzbee (1997). Cray had only been able to meet one out of four
UCAR requirements, and only one of eight systems offered could have been
tested.
29 See Maur and Messerlin (1999: 2). Under US anti - dumping rules, if one foreign
company is found guilty of dumping in the US market, the penalties apply to
all firms producing the same good in that country. Consequently, all Japanese
supercomputer producers were penalized, even though they had nothing to
do with the NEC case.

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30 Compare the 454 percent with the DOC’s pre - decisional analysis which con-
cluded dumping margins ranging between 163 and 280 percent.
31 Earlier in the process, NEC asked the ITC to appoint an ‘unbiased body’ to rule
in place of the DOC. NEC had evidence—a memorandum to the NSF—that
the DOC had prejudged the case before it went to trial. See Inside US Trade, 13
September 1996.
32 In a subsequent petition to the Supreme Court, NEC contended that ‘the CAFC
decision effectively creates a double standard which discriminates against for-
eign respondents in antidumping cases by requiring them to meet a much
higher burden of proof than that applied in other administrative proceedings’
(Business Wire, 1998).
33 Joseph L. Galloway, a senior military correspondent and former chief for
United Press International, provides a caustic commentary on this case.
See Galloway (2004) ‘Air Force Let Boeing Rewrite Contract’, 31 March
http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Galloway 033104,00.html.
34 See Swibel (2004:60). The contest was over a $ 70 million replacement helicopter
for President Bush, but the larger stakes involve ‘a much bigger honeypot: $ 7
billion of development contracts for engineering up to 200 Air Force search -
and - rescue helicopters, starting in 2006.’
35 This issue is discussed in depth in our paper ‘The Mythology of US Trade Pol-
icy’, presented at the World International Studies Congress, Istanbul, Septem-
ber 2005.

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