Earlier this month, bowing to pressure from ranchers and their allies, the White House issued an Executive Order that appeared to resuscitate a long dormant policy: country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for beef and pork. As news of election interference, systematic civil rights abuses, and rampant corruption dominate headlines, skeptics may be forgiven for asking “who cares?” In fairness, COOL is unlikely to revolutionize grocery shopping for most consumers, whose top concern remains stubbornly high food inflation. But the White House’s sudden embrace of this long-neglected cause offers hope that political gravity endures, and elected officeholders ignore it at their peril.

 COOL is special, in that Congress got rid of it at the behest of an international trade tribunal. That had not happened before 2015. In the Spring of that year, then President Barack Obama gave a speech in defense of the proposed TransPacific Partnership, saying “critics warn that parts of this deal would undermine American regulation -- food safety, worker safety, even financial regulations.  They’re making this stuff up.  This is just not true.  No trade agreement is going to force us to change our laws.”  But that is exactly what happened before the end of the year.

 On December 7, 2015, the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body held that COOL violated U.S. treaty obligations with Canada and Mexico. Eleven days later, Congress repealed the law. The effort was led by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-TX), who cited the “the irreparable damages of retaliation, both to our economy and the trade relationship with Canada and Mexico,” to argue that “American businesses, small and large, can ill afford to pay the penalty for this failed experiment.” 

Then presidential candidate Donald J. Trump seemed to channel the indignity of this submissive posture on the campaign trail. He railed against the TransPacific Partnership as an agreement that would “undermine our independence” by creating “a new international commission that makes decisions the American people can't veto.” And he promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico “to get a better deal for our workers.” But he never mentioned COOL specifically, until last week. 

This omission was glaring as the first Trump Administration replaced NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020. While the USMCA purportedly sought to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, critics charge that its “exploitative” intellectual property provisions actually served to “compromise worker interests by prioritizing the agendas of Big Tech and Big Pharma.” In the years since USCMA’s adoption, U.S. trade deficits with Canada and Mexico have grown. More to the point, the agreement did nothing to reclaim the U.S. sovereignty lost to Canada and Mexico’s WTO lawsuits. Under USMCA, Congress remained powerless to require a label on a package of ground beef to say what country the meat came from.  

That impotence surely suited many members of Congress, who could avoid taking a vote that alienated their corporate meatpacker campaign contributors, or the 89% of Americans that favor COOL. The popular support would seem to include conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote as a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that “country-of-origin labeling is justified by the Government’s historically rooted interest in supporting American manufacturers, farmers, and ranchers as they compete with foreign manufacturers, farmers, and ranchers.”

Now, however, with the President signaling support for COOL, and showing zero concern for flouting U.S. trade obligations, Congress will need a new excuse for inaction. E.O. 14425 gives one, kicking the can down the road for 90 days while Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins endeavors to “review all statutory and regulatory authorities that may permit the establishment of mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef products.” Another order, E.O. 14424, released the same day, requires a report from Rollins’ USDA within 60 days on how the agency can protect ranchers from “unfair, deceptive, or monopolistic practices.” 

But the industry has inertia, and inflation, on its side. In response to E.O. 14425, the trade associations have dusted off their talking points, along with new eye-popping estimates of how much labeling would cost consumers. They are urging Congress to allow a voluntary “Product of USA” labeling initiative—promulgated by the Biden Administration but whose enforcement is touted in E.O. 14425—to “be given a chance to succeed before Congress repeats a burdensome and costly regulatory mistake.” 

Congress indeed made a mistake, but not when it required COOL for beef and pork in the 2002 Farm Bill. The mistake came in 2015, when congressional leaders subordinated American democracy to international corporatocracy. Accountability to voters is lower than ever these days, with the 119th Congress on a record setting path of inactivity. But ranchers and consumers have not forgotten COOL, and they are making their voices heard.