Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is calling for a fundamental reworking of U.S. supply chains, arguing that the country can no longer afford to depend on overseas sources for critical goods and materials. 

“The nation that depends on its adversaries for critical inputs is not truly sovereign," Bessent said.

In a speech delivered on June 23 at the Economic Club of New York's America 250 Gala dinner, Bessent claimed that decades of prioritizing low-cost sourcing have left the U.S. vulnerable to supply chain disruptions, all while compromising the country's domestic manufacturing.

“We have rediscovered at great cost what Hamilton taught us around the time of our founding: that every nation ‘ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply,’" Bessent said. "That our strength, in other words, is derived from what we can build, for the nation that cannot produce what it needs is not truly secure."

Bessent went on to assert that the U.S. has grown complacent in its economic standing, as it's relied more and more on overseas sourcing, allowing critical supply chains to migrate overseas, and exposing the U.S. economy to pressure from foreign governments. He argued that those vulnerabilities have become impossible to ignore, pointing to the concentration of critical supply chains in countries that do not share U.S. interests, and the growing use of trade and industrial policy as tools of geopolitical leverage.

The result, he said, is an economy that has become overly dependent on foreign suppliers for critical goods, ranging from critical technologies to pharmaceuticals.

In the first year and a half of President Donald Trump's second term, the White House has frequently taken an adversarial approach to global trade, using tariffs, sanctions and other policy tools to pressure partners into addressing what the administration views as unfair trade practices. The results have been demonstrably uneven, as efforts to reshore manufacturing and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers have collided with higher costs, retaliatory trade measures and disruptions to established supply chains.