The United States textile sector has faced significant trials in recent years as geopolitics and economic unease have led to global sourcing shakeups. For the most part, the rejiggering of sourcing portfolios hasn’t been kind to the embattled U.S. industry, which has seen 40 mills close in a little over two years.
But there’s hope, the National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO) believes, in bringing Washington around to its side. The group, which represents an integrated textile and apparel supply chain employing 453,122 American workers that generates $60.9 billion per year, is seeking the help of Congressional lawmakers and the Trump administration in securing new opportunities for American makers.
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At NCTO’s annual meeting in the nation’s capital last week, the group’s chairman, Chuck Hall (who is also the president and CEO of Barnet, a technical textile manufacturer headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina), said NCTO last year engaged in face-to-face discussions with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, along with members of the Department of War and the Defense Logistics Agency to tout the industry’s capabilities and capacity.
“Those meetings elevated our industry as a strategic sector and impacted policy,” Hall said. “Despite weakening in some fundamentals”—the value of U.S. man-made fiber, textile and apparel shipments dropped from $63.9 billion in 2024 to about $60.9 billion last year—and exports of fibers, textiles and apparel fell from $28 billion to $27 billion in the same time frame—“I remain cautiously optimistic that the industry will once again navigate the disruptions and remain resilient this year,” he added.
That’s in some part due to the legislative wins that NCTO members saw in 2025: the end of the de minimis trade provision, tariff exemptions for Western Hemisphere free-trade partners, and renewed interest in buying American-made products for the U.S. armed forces.
“In 2026, global competition remains fierce. Policy uncertainty remains real. Enforcement gaps remain persistent. But so does our resolve,” Hall said. “The positives are that the administration is focused on a strategy to support domestic manufacturing, and our industry, while showing some cracks, remains incredibly resilient.”
In 2026, the trade group aims to advocate for preserving the duty-free treatment of qualified textile and apparel products under trade pacts like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—up for review in July—and the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). It wants to see the administration, which is currently enacting the second phase of its tariff strategy, create carve-outs for inputs and machinery not available in the U.S.
NCTO is also fighting for the protection and expansion of the Berry Amendment, and it’s looking for more robust enforcement of trade laws, from new tariffs to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).
“Forced labor in the textiles industry is a real problem around the world, and it’s a problem for folks in the United States who have to deal with competition from folks who are literally using modern day slavery in some cases or… poor working conditions to out compete you,” Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Rick Switzer said at the event on Thursday, referring to the subject of the Trump administration’s recently announced Section 301 investigations into 60 countries across the globe, including China.
“And then the other side of that is excess industrial capacity. You have economies subsidizing production, reducing the cost of inputs, doing everything they can to build [up] and flood our market,” he added, referring to the second Section 301 investigation, launched soon after the first.
Asked by NCTO president and CEO Kim Glas about the potential for exemptions related to machinery and other inputs that U.S. textile producers need to build and scale their operations, Switzer intimated that they were on the table, but that the administration is wary of exempting too many products and worsening the U.S. trade deficit.
“The trade deficit, in some ways, is a symptom of a cause… The cause is forced labor, environment, subsidies, overcapacity, a whole bunch of other non-tariff barriers that prevent U.S. participation,” Switzer said. The deputy USTR ambassador said the intention of the 301 investigations is to provide a solution that “will remain in place” in order to provide “stability.”
“We want folks to have certainty and clarity,” he added.
Switzer also sought to reaffirm the administration’s commitment to CAFTA-DR and USMCA, though President Donald Trump has taken shots at the agreement with Mexico and Canada in recent months, even calling it “irrelevant.”
“CAFTA-DR is going to be upheld, [USMCA] is going to be where it is now, maybe we can find some ways to make it even work a little better,” he said.
While Switzer’s presence at the event was in itself a show of support domestic production, the administration appears to be struggling to fully divorce itself from the “tanks not T-shirts” rhetoric that several officials, including the president and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, trotted out last year.
In talking about the need to strategically scale critical industries, Switzer commented, “Zippers and buttons and all these things… they just don’t exist, right? Nobody can do it here.” In fact, multiple producers who were present at the meeting do produce trims domestically.
The moment highlighted the government’s ongoing, almost myopic focus on technology like chips and semiconductors, which has left domestic apparel and textile manufacturers—many of which answered the call during the Covid-19 crisis to critical personal protective equipment when overseas options were not available—feeling abandoned.
It was a sentiment that Trump senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, who also spoke at the meeting, seemed to sympathize with. “You’re… up against an attitude among the elites, particularly in this town [who say] ‘Yeah, we don’t want you making T-shirts anymore,’” he acknowledged.
“Of course, the pandemic comes along, and they don’t say, ‘Where’s the T-shirts?’ They say, ‘Where’s their gowns, where’s our masks, where’s all the textiles we need? War comes along. ‘Why can’t we put uniforms on our soldiers or our customs and border folks?’” Navarro said, underscoring the point domestic manufacturers have been trying to make: it’s about more than clothing consumers.
“If you don’t have domestic production, you don’t have either economic or military sovereignty. And so everything we do is designed under the flag of economic security is national security; that is, we understand that if we don’t have vibrant textile industry, if we don’t have vibrant steel or aluminum or copper industries, if we can’t control the world’s chips now, we will not be able to have prosperity or security,” he added.
