Peter Navarro
Director, Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy
Peter Kent Navarro was born in July 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned an undergraduate degree from Tufts University, then spent three years in the U.S. Peace Corps serving in Thailand. He earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard.
Navarro served as a policy analyst for the Urban Services Group, the Massachusetts Energy Office, and the U.S. Department of Energy. He was a research associate at Harvard’s Energy and Environmental Policy Center and later was a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, the University of San Diego, and the University of California at Irvine.
He served as an economic policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and was selected by president-elect Trump to head a newly-created position, the director of the White House National Trade Council. In April 2017, the National Trade Council became part of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and Navarro was appointed Director.
Navarro is the author or co-author of 13 books, including Death by China. He is married to Leslie LeBon. They have one son and several cats.
In the News…
The fact that America has an international supply chain in many areas of the economy has taken a toll on employment but right now, for medicines and medical equipment, it has “cost lives,” White House adviser Peter Navarro said in an interview.
“It’s a situation where we found ourselves in many of our sectors in the economy, where we’ve off-shored our jobs, machine tools, electronics, steel, whatever it is. That costs us jobs. In this case, it costs us lives,” Navarro said. “And so one of the lessons I hope we learn after this is over is to bring those jobs home here to America so that we can make the medicines, make the face masks and have what we need here.”
He said, “Our supply chains for medicines, medical supplies and medical equipment, it’s spread out all over the world. And that works fine when there’s no problem and you don’t need the imported items. But check this out. We buy about $120 billion of medicines every year from the rest of the world. About 95 percent of them come from about 20 countries.” He added, “Ten of those countries have already imposed some forms of export restrictions on the things we actually need.”
Among the imported things American needs most is personal protective equipment. “That’s the front line for health care workers in order to take this virus on.”
Contact this Leader…
Did you pray for Director Navarro today? You can let him know at:
Mr. Peter Navarro, Director
Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20500
