Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross vowed the U.S. will be "aggressive" on trade and will move to fix bad deals.
"We'll be aggressive on trade because we know that deals that have been made historically have resulted in the great loss of manufacturing jobs, a great amount of closures of manufacturing businesses. We don't want that to continue," Ross said during an interview with CNBC.
"So the first emphasis will be on facilitating U.S. exports to other countries — getting rid of both tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade," he continued. "The other side of that will be preventing illegally-subsidized goods from coming in — and really enforcing it."
He backed the Trump administration for looking at a border adjusted tax. The tax would give breaks to exports and penalized imports.
"We need to do something to balance the budget," he said.
But such a tax faces serious opposition, Time magazine noted, as the powerful retail industry's lobby strongly opposes the plan and even members of Trump's team appear divided.
Ross did not endorse the tax in his appearance on CNBC, and Time reported the president's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, has panned the border adjusted tax entirely.
Meanwhile, Ross told CNBC a priority will be to first renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada.
"The first on our agenda is NAFTA because we think it makes sense to solidify your own neighborhood first," he said.
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