Trade Talks

It wasn’t a surprise when Clifton Albright received an invitation from President Barack Obama’s administration to serve on the Industry Trade Advisory Committee on Small, Minority, and Woman-led Business. He’d worked to help elect him and became friendly with people in his inner circle.

But when the Trump administration asked him to stay on board, that was unexpected.  

“I was packing up,” says Albright, a founding partner at Albright, Yee & Schmit. “I figured it was over. And then I received a call from the Trump administration asking me if I would stay on. I was a little confused. I said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’”

The caller did, noting that they appreciated his work. In the end, Albright decided to accept. “This is about the country, not about individuals,” he says. “So I stayed on for another four years.”

ITAC 11, now known as ITAC 9—after several were cut or combined during the Trump administration—is dedicated to ensuring that the interests of American small businesses are represented in U.S. trade policy. Reporting to the secretary of commerce and the U.S. trade secretary, the committee advises policymakers on safeguarding a level playing field for U.S. companies.

“We did a lot of negotiating on imports, trade agreements, things that we found to be not fair as it related to the U.S. trade policies with other countries,” he says.

One such policy involved the practice of paying dock workers in foreign countries to move shipments in a timely manner. According to Albright, in some countries outside the U.S., it’s customary for companies to give such laborers financial incentives to unload and transport their goods quickly, or even to ensure that their shipments are offloaded first.

In the U.S., however, this practice amounts to a bribe, and any company engaging in it is subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

“You could be arrested and prosecuted for a felony,” says Albright, but “in smaller countries, that’s how they did business. It was kind of an unwritten rule.”

Which left American small businesses at a disadvantage. 

“We had to think about that,” Albright says. “How do you get American goods on foreign soil distributed without getting the heads of companies charged with federal crimes?”

I was packing up, and then I received a call from the Trump administration asking me if I would stay on. I was a little confused. I said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’

In the end, enough pressure was applied to foreign governments to guarantee that traders, negotiators and government officials would not allow the practice to continue.

The Obama administration and Trump administration obviously handled foreign trade very differently, Albright says. “Under the Obama administration, you got a lot more cooperation, you got a lot more accomplished, but you paid the price sometimes,” says Albright. “And in the Trump administration, you got a lot less cooperation, but when you got something, it was pretty much what you thought you were going to get.”

It was an open secret, for example, that the Chinese government was hacking into businesses, stealing information, and using it to make duplicates at a lower cost. “It was known,” Albright says.

When Trump took office, both countries began raising tariffs in retaliation to one another. “You probably remember how the trade tariff war was going on,” says Albright. “At the end, when tariffs were so high you couldn’t believe it, the Chinese blinked.” But it was tough in other ways, too. “Some of the unwillingness on the part of the Trump administration to negotiate with certain countries made it a little more difficult. Concessions that we would have, or agreements that we had, were no longer available.”

Albright credits his time with ITAC 9 as offering him valuable insight into what his clients face daily.

“It gave me a broader view and a clearer understanding of what employers face and what employees have to deal with in trying to move products and business in the United States and outside the United States,” he says. “I got to see or hear some of the day-to-day issues even before they became a problem.”