Bloomberg: Biden Selects House Senior Counsel As U.S. Trade Rep

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped senior House staffer Katherine Tai to become his trade representative, two people familiar with the matter said.

Biden plans to nominate Tai, who currently serves as chief trade counsel on the House Ways and Means Committee, to lead his trade agency.

Tai was a key figure in negotiations with the Trump administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement, which passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities and was signed by Trump early this year.

Despite her reputation as a progressive Democrat, she’s respected by both members of both parties, who have praised her ability to find common ground on thorny matters such as those involving both business and labor.

Those skills could come in handy. The new trade chief will surely face pressure from competing interests on the question of whether or not to remove billions of dollars in tariffs that the Trump administration has put in place.

She’s also not new to the agency. Before her work on Capitol Hill, she served as USTR’s chief counsel for China enforcement and associate general counsel for a total of seven years.

Check out the full article from Bloomberg here.

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