Joe Biden calls for investigation of Nippon Steel takeover bid for US Steel

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Joe Biden has thrown his support behind an investigation of Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel on national security grounds, despite Japan’s status as one of Washington’s closest allies.

Nippon’s proposed $14.9bn acquisition of the Pittsburgh-headquartered steel producer has sparked a bipartisan backlash in Washington and raised a political dilemma for Biden, who has cast himself as a champion of American jobs and the most pro-union US president in decades.

Lael Brainard, Biden’s national economic adviser, said on Thursday that US president believed that “the purchase of this iconic American-owned company by a foreign entity — even one from a close ally — appears to deserve serious scrutiny in terms of its potential impact on national security and supply chain reliability”.

US Steel has plants in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Biden is likely to need to win to clinch re-election in November. White House support of the investigation comes as Biden has been touting sweeping efforts to rejuvenate rust-belt communities stricken by decades of deindustrialisation.

Brainard added that the deal was the “type of transaction” that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the inter-agency panel that vets deals for national security threats, was set up to investigate. The administration would look carefully at the findings of any Cfius investigation and “act if appropriate”, she said.

The United Steelworkers, a labour union that endorsed Biden in 2020, was “an example of why union leadership is critical in building the economy from the middle out and bottom up”, Brainard said in her statement.

The union welcomed Brainard’s intervention. “Our union shares many of the concerns expressed in today’s White House statement, including how this deal may impact the future of domestic steel production,”…