The Trump administration reportedly stepped in to prevent U.S. Steel from shutting down operations at a plant in Granite City, Illinois, with the White House using new control of the company it gained as part of an agreement that allowed a merger with Japan's Nippon Steel.

U.S. Steel had told nearly 800 workers at the plant in early September that it planned to stop processing steel slabs at the facility by November. The Wall Street Journal reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stepped in days later, telling the company that the administration wouldn't allow the shutdown to move forward. U.S. Steel then announced on September 19 that the plant would continue to supply raw steel slabs "indefinitely," but did not acknowledge whether the reversal was due to pressure from the Trump administration. The Granite City plant has been gradually scaling down its operations for years, and had idled its last operating blast furnace in 2023.

“The Trump administration is a great friend to the American steel industry, and we have ongoing positive and productive conversations with them on a variety of topics, but we do not plan to discuss the details of any of those conversations," the company said in a news release. 

President Donald Trump agreed to allow a $14 billion merger between Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel to go through in June, provided that the companies give the U.S. government a so-called "golden share" in U.S. Steel's operations moving forward. While it wasn't made immediately clear what sort of power that gave the White House moving forward, it's believed that the federal government was given control over a number of U.S. Steel board seats as part of the merger, CNBC reported in mid-June.

According to an NPR interview with Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a golden share is a mechanism that governments around the world have used to ensure national ownership and control over strategically important industries. Examples include Volkswagen in Germany, and Heathrow Airport in the U.K., where the government retains a golden share, which means that they have a say-so over any attempt to sell the company or fundamentally reorganize what the company does.