The White House appeared to make a mistake Friday in its latest executive order, which blocked Nippon Steel’s roughly $15 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel.
The order, issued Friday, repeats language from a May executive order on Chinese Real Estate, beginning with “regarding the acquisition of certain real property of Cheyenne leads by MineOne cloud computing investment I L.P.,” according to an archived version of the executive order. It is the exact language used in the title of the president’s May executive order.
Oops.
White House copy-and-pastes from a previous presidential order on a Chinese real estate transaction and uses it for the Nippon Steel announcement. And forgets to delete the title. pic.twitter.com/8ibeSYujxI— Ken Moriyasu (@kenmoriyasu) January 3, 2025
The decision to keep U.S. Steel domestically owned was referred to the president by a national security review in December after failing to reach a consensus.
Biden wrote in a Friday statement that his decision on the sale is a part of his larger commitment to “defend U.S. national security.” The sale would have placed America’s second largest steel producer under foreign control.
Nippon announced its plans to purchase U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion Jan. 5, 2024. At the time, Nippon argued that such a deal would help make the companies competitive against China’s Baowu Steel Group, according to the Michigan Journal of Economics.
“We need major U.S. companies representing the major share of US steelmaking capacity to keep leading the fight on behalf of America’s national interests. As a committee of national security and trade experts across the executive branch determined, this acquisition would place one of America’s largest steel producers under foreign control and create risk for our national security and our critical supply chains,” the president wrote.
“So, that is why I am taking action to block this deal,” he added.
