Five hundred and fifty men and women at General Motor’s Ultium battery plant in Lordstown just got laid off.

These weren’t make-work jobs. These were the kinds of high-skilled, high-wage, American manufacturing roles that Washington claims to care about — until it’s time to stand up and actually fight for them.

What happened? The short answer is that Ford and its Chinese battery partner CATL got a head start. Not because they build better batteries. Not because they invested more. But because the U.S. Senate handed them an unfair advantage by delaying the start date of the Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) rules in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

That delay — written in to benefit Ford — will let the Ford-CATL plant keep raking in U.S. taxpayer subsidies even after the FEOC guardrails are in force. And this happened, too, over the voices of voters, angry residents, and grassroots coalitions in Michigan that have mobilized for months to shut the Ford-CATL project down, warning that the partnership ships American jobs overseas and hands China the keys to our auto industry.

It was a gift. And it came at the direct expense of workers in Ohio. And where were Ohio’s Republican senators, Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, when it mattered?

They were AWOL.

Moreno talks a big game about standing up to China. He’s introduced tough-sounding bills and likes to remind voters he understands business. President Trump even considered naming him “auto czar” at one point, trusting that he’d be a wartime advisor for America’s industrial base.

Instead, when the Senate carved out a sweetheart deal for Ford and CATL — when the rubber, literally, met the road — Moreno and Husted stood down. And the workers in Lordstown paid for it.

This isn’t just about policy timing. It’s about whom Ohio’s senators chose to protect.

The delay in FEOC enforcement didn’t help America. It didn’t even help the auto industry broadly. It helped one automaker, Ford, and its one foreign partner — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed CATL.

It gave the duo a window to lock in market share, capture public subsidies, and undercut domestic competitors, which are now laying off Americans in the heart of Trump country.

The worst of it is that the Lordstown plant was exactly the kind of facility the One Big Beautiful Bill was supposed to support: American-made, American-operated, and free of direct Chinese entanglement.

But in practice, the bill’s delayed implementation gave an edge to the one EV battery partnership that most obviously contradicted the bill’s intent.

Moreno in particular — the senior senator — had a choice. He could have fought the delay. He could have demanded the FEOC rules take immediate effect to protect U.S. workers, not Chinese firms. He could have forced his colleagues to explain why CATL should benefit from U.S. clean energy subsidies while Americans get pink slips.

He didn’t. And now 550 workers in a plant in his own backyard are out of work.

This is what happens when political convenience trumps principle. It’s what happens when senators confuse the “optics” of competitiveness with the actual mechanics of competition. And it’s what happens when the people who are supposed to be the firewall between Main Street and Beijing decide the Beltway’s corporate lobbyists deserve more of their attention.

Voters in Ohio aren’t stupid. They know what’s happening. They see the headlines about CCP-connected firms getting tax breaks while their neighbors are sent home. They see a government that talks tough about decoupling while subsidizing our biggest adversary. And they see senators like Moreno and Husted retreating from the fight when it gets politically complicated.

The China threat is real. And if we’re serious about confronting it, then the first step is standing up for the Americans who are getting crushed by its consequences right now. That means pulling the plug on sweetheart deals. It means enforcing laws the moment they’re signed. And it means remembering who sent you to Washington in the first place.

The people of Ohio deserve better than excuses. And if Ohio’s senators aren’t fighting for Lordstown, who exactly — which country — are they fighting for?

Kathy DiCristofaro is a longtime Trumbull County Democratic Party official. She is a retired teacher and lives in Niles.