Unsurprisingly, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is getting much friendlier questions from Republican lawmakers in today’s House Ways and Means hearing than he did during Tuesday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing, where GOP senators grilled him on what the tariff timeline will look like, what the rationale is behind the administration’s approach, and what metrics the administration will use to measure success.

And yet even House Republicans who are wary of being overly critical in public settings of the president’s trade policy agenda are clearly feeling nervous about how the administration’s new levies will affect the economy — and their constituents. During Wednesday’s hearing, Representative Lloyd Smucker (R., Pa.) politely pressed Greer about what, exactly, the end game is here. “Take us out a few months. Take us out a few years,” Smucker said. “What is the end goal here? I think I know what that is, but I’d love to give you a chance just to expand on that. What will success look like? How will that help every American business?”

Here’s Greer’s response:

I think we’ll find that American businesses are much more competitive when they have open markets overseas. People talk about the high cost of doing business in America and manufacturing in America and growing in America, but when we cannot access foreign markets, or we face barriers overseas — and not just tariffs, but also all the non-tariff barriers that we’ve outlined in this 400-page book — that increases costs, and it makes it difficult to be competitive globally and even domestically.

At the same time, we have foreign producers who receive subsidies. They have countries where economic policies depress domestic demand. They make more stuff than they can consume. They send it here. And so, I think what we’re going to see in the near term, we’re going to see a handful of partners who open their markets more to us, and it makes it much easier and much more competitive economically to have manufacturing here, to grow products here, to process them here and export them to the rest of the world. So, it’s a virtuous cycle that you create. When you create a situation where you have open markets, you create broader economic policies, whether it’s good tax policy, good energy policy, to give you the tail wind you need. We have to reshore manufacturing. This is an important way to do it. We can have tariff protection. As we get rid of the trade deficit, reshore manufacturing, and as other countries open their markets, they can potentially have a different arrangement that helps us as we try to have reciprocal trade and get rid of the deficit and get back to being a producing economy where we need to be.

Another key line from Greer’s testimony today before the House Ways and Means Committee: “We must move away from an economy based solely on the financial sector and government spending, and we must become an economy based on producing real goods and services by American workers and our communities here.” (Good luck trying to slip that line past Dominic Pino!)

For more on intra-GOP skepticism surrounding Trump’s tariff policy — and how the administration is defending it — read my piece from last night: “Negotiable or Permanent? Deep Disagreements Emerge in GOP over Strategic Aim of Tariffs.