President Joe Biden’s Jan. 25 push to have federal agencies buy more from U.S. manufacturers is likely to clash with the government’s recent selection of Amazon for small-scale purchases by federal employees because Amazon increasingly is turning to overseas manufacturers, a Fortune magazine opinion piece argued.
“Given Amazon’s growing interest in scaling up its foreign partnerships — often at the expense of those back home — the Biden administration must be fully committed to supporting companies actually committed to supporting American manufacturing, and to spending taxpayer dollars on domestic goods to realize the promise of ‘Made in America,’” the piece argued.
Amazon Business is the company’s B2B marketplace. It lets businesses and governments buy goods like office supplies and IT products. According to Forbes, Amazon Business’s sales to business and government customers are growing at three times the pace of the eCommerce giant’s sales overall.
The collision course between Biden’s policy and the reality of government spending has its roots in a summer 2020 decision by the General Services Administration, which oversees a large portion of non-military federal government procurement. The agency on June 26 announced in a press release a three-year trial of a program through which federal employees would be allowed to make official purchases of products costing less than $10,000 through an Amazon portal.
The market could be worth billions of dollars annually, the GSA stated in a release.
“The goal of the proof-of-concept is to provide a modern buying solution for federal customers and increase transparency on agency spending that’s already taking place with better data through this solution,” the release stated. “Further, this solution leverages the government’s buying power and increases supply chain security awareness with a government-wide approach.”
On Jan. 25, Biden signed an executive order pushing federal agencies to buy from American manufacturers. The order includes provisions intended to limit the government’s issuance of waivers that let companies based in foreign countries compete for U.S. government contracts as if they were domestic companies.
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