The Commerce Department’s SelectUSA program has secured more foreign direct investment under President Donald Trump than its previous dozen-plus years combined, officials told Semafor.
That’s $280 billion from firms like Singapore’s Bitdeer, Australia’s Graphinex, Belgium’s UCB, South Korea’s Korea Zinc, and Japan’s Isuzu Motors, spread across more than 345 projects. The program, launched in 2011, had previously brought in a total of $255 billion.
Assistant Commerce Secretary David Fogel attributed the bump to the Trump administration’s efforts to scrap regulations and lower taxes — and its blunt use of tariffs, which have at times strained its relationships with trading partners.
“One of the elements of that [agenda] is using tariffs as a leverage tool to exact investment commitments from foreign countries,” Fogel told Semafor. With the midterms less than three weeks away, Fogel argued that’s a “promise [to voters] kept,” since Trump “definitely ran on a pro-worker agenda, and now we’re seeing the follow-through on that in terms of hitting these record numbers.”