The overall goods and services deficit number for January looked pretty good – coming in at $54.4 billion, its lowest monthly point in years. But when services are stripped from the equation, the goods trade looks like it has returned to level footing. January’s goods deficit was $81.7 billion, according to Thursday’s trade data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The free trade, foreign policy apparatus on Capitol Hill is openly advocating for the extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), with senior committee leaders from both parties coming out in favor of it during a March 3 Center for Strategic and International Studies event about the trade deal’s future.
Last year, Americans spent more than $15 billion on Novo Nordisk’s diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. The active ingredient in both treatments — semaglutide— has rapidly become one of the world’s most commercially successful medicines.
Cheap imports shaved prices on some goods but never made Americans richer. Wage losses and job destruction outweighed any discounts.
On Capitol Hill, the defense narrative clearly gets legislators’ attention. It remains the surest way to get Members of Congress thinking about reindustrialization and rebuilding domestic supply chains.
President Trump has made American reindustrialization and reshoring central to his economic policy agenda. Reviving American manufacturing enjoys broad public support and has increasingly become a bipartisan priority.
The Senate Finance Committee agrees on two things: First, the U.S. Mexico and Canada Agreement (USMCA) isn’t perfect and a number of issues need fixing. Second, they don’t want tariffs.
Zydus Pharmaceuticals, one of India’s largest generic drug makers, recalled over 22,000 bottles of a cholesterol medication on Dec. 30, 2025. AvKare, a Tennessee-based pharmaceuticals distribution company that relies on imports, recalled around 7,900 cartons of Rosuvastatin, a widely used generic statin, a day later.
The November trade deficit numbers returned to a more normal figure, with the services surplus still in the $20s to low $30 billion range, and the goods deficit jumping from the October lull.
Clothes are labeled. Most food is labeled. Even your car has its manufacturing country of origin stamped onto the door panel. Pharmaceuticals on the other hand, one of the biggest import items and certainly one most critical to our daily health safety and security, usually do not come with any labels at all.
