Federal Contractors Under Trump Are Offshoring at a Speedy Clip

(Bloomberg) -- Despite President Donald Trump's promises to bring millions of jobs back to the U.S., corporate contractors for the government have been “outsourcing” positions at a speedy pace, according Good Jobs Nation, an organization that advocates for contract workers.

In the year since Trump's election, the federal government has certified that 93,449 jobs were lost to outsourcing or trade competition, the labor group said in an analysis of data from the Labor Department's Trade Adjustment Assistance program and Treasury's USASpending.gov database.

Since Trump's election in November last year, the top 100 federal contractors have been certified as shipping a record 10,269 American jobs abroad, according to the report.

Of those, four federal contractors each had more than 1,000 offshoring-related job losses certified: General Motors, Boeing, Pfizer, and United Technologies, which is the parent company of Carrier. The furnace and air-conditioner manufacturer made headlines a year ago when then-President-elect Trump said he had reached a deal to keep open Carrier's Indiana plant, preserving local jobs.

Good Jobs Nation isn't the only one speaking up for contract workers. In September, Senator Bernie Sanders and four of his Democratic colleagues wrote to Trump urging that he issue an executive order denying federal contracts to companies that offshore jobs.

The White House has not publicly responded to that request. Just last week, the president tweeted that he was headed back to his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he spent the Thanksgiving holidays, “for talks on bringing even more jobs and companies back to the USA!”

To contact the reporter on this story: Josh Eidelson in Washington at jeidelson@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sarah McGregor at smcgregor5@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu

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