Foreign Trade

Since his election, Joyce has sided increasingly with the sovereign trade wing of the GOP, sometimes even dissenting from party leadership to vote against trade bills of dubious benefit to the country. With a lifetime party loyalty rating hovering around 95%, such selective dissent from Joyce is significant, and welcome.

The 13th district, heavily reliant on agriculture and manufacturing, suffered badly during the “Walmart Economy” years. Joyce’s predecessor, Bill Shuster, was a strident free trader with a voting record to match, even as Pennsylvania industries shuttered and our workers were pauperized, compensated only with impossibly cheap Chinese plastic goods. Joyce’s trade stance is far more compatible with the interests of a largely blue collar district with an annual per capita income of $36k, about 19% below the national figure.

Two bad trade bills, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Extension Act and the Haiti Economic Lift Program Extension Act, passed the House easily in January 2026, with support from almost every Democrat and a big majority of Republicans. Joyce broke with the GOP majority to vote Nay, arguing (correctly) that the two regions were essentially re-exporting Chinese goods. Joyce was in a GOP minority of 149–43 and 146–45 for each vote, respectively.

Joyce voted with the GOP Freedom Caucus in 2022 against the DHS Trade and Economic Security Council Act, which would have created a new Department of Homeland Security council tasked with advising on trade-linked economic-security threats — things like supply-chain vulnerabilities and foreign economic coercion. It was a Republican bill that passed the House comfortably, 348–75, under a suspension of the rules that allowed no amendments and very limited debate. Joyce joined Chip Roy, Jim Jordan and 65 other Republicans in voting Nay. A handful of lefty Dems joined them.

Joyce didn’t issue any statements explaining his vote, but it was nonetheless correct at the time. Sponsored by Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI) and Rep. John Katko (R-NY), the bill was a well-intentioned effort to address real security threats. But expanding Biden’s DHS bureaucracy, even by a relatively meager $3 million, at a time when migrants were flooding the southern border unchecked, was a nonsensical congressional gesture. There was a far more urgent need to get DHS to execute its primary task: defending the borders and deporting illegal immigrants. Joyce was right to resist.

In February 2026, the House voted on H.J.Res. 72, a resolution from Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) ending the “national emergency” of the Trump administration’s tariffs on Canada. It passed 219–211, with six Republicans joining nearly every Democrat. Joyce voted no, along with 210 Republicans who voted to keep the tariffs in place. As expected, the resolution stalled in the Senate Finance Committee.

Earlier in his tenure, on December 19, 2019, Joyce voted for the USMCA Implementation Act, which replaced NAFTA with a renegotiated agreement including new American content requirements for automobiles and updated labor provisions. The “free trade” Cato Institute described the USMCA as the “protectionist love child of the labor left and the nationalist right.” We saw it as modest sovereign improvement over NAFTA, and Joyce saw it as plausible way to boost Pennsylvania dairy exports. USMCA passed the House 385–41. PA dairy exports rose unevenly for a few years (see chart), peaking in 2024, before declining again amid ongoing intra-continental trade battles since Trump resumed the presidency.

In January 2026, Joyce voted for the Remote Access Security Act, blocking Chinese firms from remotely accessing advanced U.S. chips. He flagged the risk back in 2021, telling the Tribune-Democrat after a White House meeting that “ninety percent of the medicines used in America today are generic, and those generics come from China” — and warning that over-reliance on Beijing would keep hitting “the microchips that are so necessary in the defense industry in Johnstown.”