Writing in the fall issue of American Affairs, Rep. Riley Moore (R‑WV) argues that American deindustrialization was a choice—that Washington refused to protect the steel industry and that a West Virginia steel mill and others like it died because of choices made by policymakers. He proposes much higher tariffs, direct federal investment through a new industrial bank modeled on the Development Finance Corporation, the enactment of the Defense Production Act to speed up permitting, and a requirement that the Defense Department buy more specialized domestic steel.
History supports neither the argument nor the remedy. Protection has virtually never been withheld from the steel industry. It was granted continuously for six decades, and the legacy mills declined anyway.
History of Failed Protectionism
As my Cato colleague Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and I documented in a lengthy 2025 paper, policymakers have bent over backward to accommodate the protectionist requests from the domestic steel industry.
Here’s an abbreviated history: As the United States emerged victorious from World War II, domestic steel thrived. In 1950, American firms accounted for 53 percent of the world’s steel production. Yet that market share would soon erode as other economies redeveloped from the wreckage of the war. In the summer of 1959, the United Steelworkers went on strike for more than 100 days, and American steel-consuming manufacturers turned to imported steel to fill the void. As Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Irwin documents, management took the wrong lesson from this episode. Rather than risking another walkout, producers bought peace with labor, conceding to wage increases unrelated to what they were actually producing.
Japan and Europe were indeed generous in providing subsidies to their domestic steel industries. Yet Rep. Moore leaves out a crucial detail of this story. Those subsidized foreign steel firms were also quicker to embrace new technology—basic oxygen furnaces, which made steel far more efficiently than the open-hearth furnaces American producers largely stuck with. Basic oxygen furnaces were running commercially in Austria by 1952. U.S. Steel waited until 1964. By the mid 1970s, Nippon Steel’s average blast furnace was roughly four times the size of U.S. Steel’s.
Imports climbed from roughly 5 percent of American steel consumption in 1960 to about 15 percent in 1970. In response, a coalition formed that continues to shape US steel and trade policy: mill owners, unions, and the members of Congress who represent both.
In 1967, legislation was introduced to cap foreign steel at about 10 percent of the domestic market. This marked America’s turn toward aggressive protection. It never had to pass. Under pressure from the Johnson administration, Japan and the European Economic Community agreed to cap their own exports instead, an arrangement that ran from 1960 through 1974.
The Carter administration followed with a trigger price mechanism in 1978, allowing the government to monitor import prices and accelerate antidumping (AD) investigations when steel arrived below a set price floor. In 1982, domestic producers filed 155 AD and countervailing duty (CVD) petitions against more than 40 companies in 11 countries. The Reagan administration responded with restraints covering about 80 percent of imported steel, targeting 15 countries by 1985. A 1987 Brookings study examined US steel protectionism (along with auto protectionism) from the Johnson to Reagan administrations and found that the policies were counterproductive. The policies discouraged quality improvements and led to overinvestment and inflated labor contracts, merely postponing the necessary adjustments.
George H. W. Bush continued the restrictions and extended them for another two and a half years. AD/CVD petitions were continuously filed during the latter stages of the H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations. George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs of up to 30 percent on 10 categories of steel products in 2002.
The layering never stopped. Buy American rules require steel in federally funded projects to be melted and poured domestically—a standard that excludes even American firms that roll imported semi-finished steel.
Steel-related products now account for a large plurality of AD/CVD orders and suspension agreements, a share that no other industry remotely approaches.
In 2018, President Trump declared steel imports—including from long-standing allies and NATO members—a threat to US national security and imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel. This happened despite the president’s own defense secretary at the time, James Mattis, noting that the US military needed only about 3 percent of domestic production. Several allies received exemptions or quota arrangements. The second Trump administration removed them all in 2025. A few months later, the Trump administration doubled the rate to 50 percent.
Today, those tariffs reach derivative products made with the metals, including washing machines, refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioning machines, electric cooking stoves, fire extinguishers, and hat racks, among other items with no nexus to US national security. Those derivative tariffs cover a higher value of US trade than the primary steel products do.
Today, the domestic steel industry is the most protected sector of the US economy.
Weirton in the Timeline
Note where the Weirton mill falls in that timeline. National Steel put the mill up for sale in March 1982, the same year as a wave of 155 AD/CVD petitions against 41 companies in 11 countries. No corporate buyer came forward, so in September 1983, the Weirton workforce bought the mill itself.
Moore’s account attributes the collapse of the early ’80s to the late-’70s oil shock and the recession that followed Fed Chairman Paul A. Volcker’s necessary rate hikes. He is largely correct, but this is not a story of import competition. What followed is even more damaging to his argument. Weirton filed for bankruptcy in May 2003, about a year after the Bush administration imposed 30 percent Section 201 safeguard tariffs on tin mill products: the highest rate covered by the tariffs at the time. These tariffs were squarely aimed at the product line Weirton made.
What Actually Shrank the Industry
Economists Allan Collard-Wexler and Jan De Loecker provided the best evidence on what happened to steel employment, using plant-level Census data covering 1963–2002. They found that the industry’s productivity surge was driven by minimills—electric arc furnace operations pioneered by Nucor Corporation and Steel Dynamics. Minimills displacing integrated producers accounted for about one-third of the gain outright, and competition from minimills drove a productivity resurgence among the integrated plants that survived.
That is the story of innovative domestic firms embracing technology and beating legacy firms that were slower to adopt it. The timing confirms this: Between 1972 and 2002, steel imports grew 4.1 percent, while nonsteel manufactured imports grew 66 percent. Steel employment losses came while steel was among the most insulated corners of American manufacturing, not the more exposed.
Weirton’s Second Collapse
In 2020, Cleveland-Cliffs acquired Weirton as part of its purchase of ArcelorMittal USA. The Weirton tinplate operation was idled in early 2024, but Cleveland-Cliffs announced it would convert Weirton into a plant building electrical transformers. The $150 million project received a forgivable $50 million loan from the West Virginia Economic Development Authority, with the electrical steel to come from Cliffs’ own Butler Works mill.
In 2025, the plan was scrapped as the company planned to refocus on the automotive industry. Cleveland-Cliffs’ first-quarter results showed a $483 million net loss, and it began idling plants.
Consider the landscape by then, as Cleveland-Cliffs was experiencing significant losses. Every Section 232 “national security” tariff exemption and quote had been eliminated, and the rate was weeks from doubling to 50 percent. This was the most protected American steel market since at least the Reagan administration, with public capital committed—and the company still walked away.
The Bill
American steel buyers—largely manufacturers—are paying for all this protectionism. US steel prices continue to vastly outpace prices in the rest of the world, as Carrillo Obregon and I noted last month. In June, for example, the price of hot-rolled band was 54 percent higher in the US than in Western Europe and more than 145 percent higher than the world steel export market. While steel prices are trending down in other markets, US prices continue to climb.
A Steel Market Update analysis shows what tariffs are doing to the math. Factor in duties and the practical costs of importing, and domestic hot-rolled runs about $10 more per short ton than Italian steel and $6 more than German steel. That may look like parity, but it isn’t. Strip out the 50 percent “national security” tariff, and those gaps explode—to $363 and $361 per short ton, respectively. The tariff is not offsetting foreign advantages—it’s manufacturing an American price premium.
American consumers—families and manufacturers—are bearing the brunt of these ill-conceived policies.
When the W. Bush tariffs took effect, workers in steel-consuming industries outnumbered steelworkers 57 to 1—12.8 million to 170,000. Economist Lydia Cox found that those tariffs cost about 168,000 jobs in steel-using industries between 2002 and 2009, more than the entire steel-producing sector employed. Research from economists James Lake and Ding Liu found that the W. Bush steel tariffs’ negative impact was highly persistent, continuing for a full five years after the tariffs were lifted.
Economists Gary Hufbauer and Eujin Jung estimated that the 2018 steel tariffs cost roughly $650 for every steel job saved.
Rep. Moore’s proposal hits the wrong target. Moore frames the stakes around China, but China supplied less than 2 percent of American steel imports in 2024. Canada, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Japan supplied the bulk of it. Tariffs justified by Beijing target almost exclusively allies.
Sixty years on, the scoreboard is unambiguous. Domestic steel production was lower in 2024 than in 2017, the year before President Trump imposed major “national security” tariffs on steel imports. Capacity utilization was lower in 2024 than in 2015, and employment was lower too. American consumers—families and manufacturers—are bearing the brunt of these ill-conceived policies, and Rep. Moore’s solution would only exacerbate the problem.
