T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY From left to right, MARSHALLTOWN Co. Chief Information Officer and At-Large City Councilor Jeff Schneider, MARSHALLTOWN President/CEO Joe Carter, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), MARSHALLTOWN Marketing Director Ashley Swanson, MARSHALLTOWN Corporate Facilities Director Joe Mathern and MARSHALLTOWN Vice President of Operations John Christen pose for a photo at the tail end of Sen. Grassley’s visit on Wednesday morning, which was part of his annual 99 County Tour.

After he visited MARSHALLTOWN Company’s facilities on South 8th Avenue for the third time in his political career as part of his annual 99-county tour on Wednesday morning, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) couldn’t help but notice how much the tool manufacturer has continued to grow throughout its illustrious history dating back over a century.

“I learned how much this company has expanded, in space as well as in business, since I visited here, the first time was in 1976, I believe,” he said, noting that he was serving in the U.S. House at the time. “And then I visited here as a Senator. It’s much bigger now than it was then.”

Grassley, 91, one of the longest serving Senators in U.S. history, spent about an hour touring the company’s facilities and sitting down for a question and answer session that included MARSHALLTOWN Co. staff, three Marshalltown city councilors, Marshall County Supervisor Jarret Heil, Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce President/CEO John Hall and UnityPoint Health — Marshalltown Hospital Administrator Shari King. During a subsequent interview with the T-R, Grassley said tariffs — “not really liking them,” he noted, but acknowledging a desire to level the playing field with China — were a key focus for MARSHALLTOWN.

“I think (with) the environment we’re in now, you’re gonna have a lot of tariffs, and I think they’re accepting that. But I think the main reason is China subsidizing their products, unfair competition to manufacturers in the United States,” the Senator said.

MARSHALLTOWN President/CEO Joe Carter emphasized his company’s goal of keeping production in the U.S. as well as a provision in President Donald Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which took effect in 2018, that left out a domestic production deduction and, in his opinion, harmed American manufacturers.

“Tariffs are impacting us. Every day that a new tariff comes into place, we’ve gotta deal with it because we’re getting aluminum ingot out of Canada, as an example. We’ve got steel coming from Austria and from Scandinavia,” Carter said. “Certainly, we import our lower price point products — some of them, from China, from Vietnam, from Singapore, from Malaysia, India, etc. from all over the world. So anytime there’s a tariff put on those, then you don’t have the immediate ability to be able to manufacture that product in the United States without having more building, more equipment or more people, etc. You want to be able to do that, but without that capital, you can’t do that quickly, so it forces us to then decide ‘Alright, how much of that are we gonna pass along to our retailers who are buying our product?’ and how that impacts us there. So it’s an immediate loss in profit as soon as that occurs.”

He added that he understood Trump’s long-term goal of making the U.S. less reliant on foreign goods but also lamented the lack of a “level playing field” compared to countries like China and Vietnam.

“They just don’t have to deal with those sort of things that we have to here in this country, so it’s hard. I always say manufacturing is just hard, but we’re the only ones who really import money,” Carter said. “What we’re trying to do is take product from inside our facility and sell it outside… I know less than one percent of our sales even occur in the state of Iowa, and so anytime we can sell something to some guy in Germany or in England or in California, we just suck their money here and then we pay our employees. So we’re importers of money is what I like to say. But we’re competing against the Chinese because they don’t have to worry about getting sued. They don’t have to worry about paying for worker’s compensation insurance. They’ve got all these advantages that we just don’t have, so ‘How do you level the playing field?’ is what I was trying to ask the Senator.”

Carter also urged Grassley not to lose sight of micropolitan communities like Marshalltown and hoped steps would be taken to address the shortage of affordable housing, though he wasn’t sure there were any easy answers to that problem. Other major topics of discussion included the proposed tax bill, the local hospital “needing some help,” interest rates, the long-term solvency of Social Security and the actions of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, better known by the acronym DOGE.

On Tuesday, District Court Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that one of DOGE’s most high profile efforts — the push to swiftly shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — likely violated the Constitution, and Trump subsequently vowed to appeal the ruling while criticizing “rogue judges that are destroying our country.”

“I think court cases and judges, their decisions have to be followed. If you don’t like them, appeal them, and the president has said he’s going to follow the decisions, but he’s going to appeal them,” Grassley said.

The Senator praised DOGE for finding “stupid uses of taxpayer money” and added that he believes they’ve only scraped the surface thus far. Referencing President Harry Truman’s famous slogan “The buck stops here,” however, Grassley said Musk only has as much power as the President grants him.

“I think that they have moved very quickly to realize that the public was looking at it as Musk and DOGE having final power to do it, and in the last couple weeks, they’ve moved from anything that DOGE thinks needs to be done, it goes through the President now down to all the cabinet people to make the decision, and that’s the way it should be,” he said.

On immigration, the only further legislation that may be pursued, according to Grassley, involves finishing the border wall, hiring more border patrol agents and tracking the 320,000 unaccompanied children who have been “lost in our society.”

“Beyond that, if we have legislation, I think it’ll be more in the area of very narrow pieces of legislation dealing with agricultural workers, seasonal workers, professional workers — what we call H-1B types — I think that’s where the legislation’s gonna have to center,” he said. “If we had the ability to get 60 votes in the United States Senate for comprehensive immigration legislation, that’s the direction we should go, but I think that’s gonna be a heavy lift.”

Regarding the bird flu outbreak, Grassley praised new Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins for her efforts to combat it and follow state and federal protocols, and he also felt that Congress itself, not the President, deserved the blame for so much of modern political action being conducted by executive order.

“You have to understand that that’s all the fault of Congress, not the fault of the President assuming authority because he doesn’t have any authority. There’s a little bit under the Constitution, like being Commander-in-Chief and being our foreign affairs spokesman, and then there’s something that’s called the executive power of the President. I don’t know how to define that, but that’s very much a minority of the stuff he can do on his own volition,” Grassley said. “Like these tariffs, these are all a result of the 1963 tariff law and the 1974 tariff law where Congress compromised one of 18 powers it has under the Constitution to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, delegating so much authority to the President of the United States. Now, we can pass legislation to draw that back, but I’ll tell you, it’s just practically impossible. And I wasn’t even a member of Congress when those things passed.”

Grassley was scheduled to attend a meeting with the Tama County Economic Development Commission in Dysart later in the day and was asked about the fact that GOP leadership has discouraged Republican Senators and Representatives from holding public town hall meetings in light of the hostile receptions they’ve recently received at some of them. The Senator, who has become known for his 99-county tours, said he planned to hold an open town hall meeting at the Franklin County Courthouse in Hampton on Friday and felt it was important to hear from constituents whether they agree with him or not.

“There was some public, outside of employees here, but I’ve had this practice for 45 years — go to a few high schools every year, a few factories every year, maybe three or four hospitals. I go to places where people can’t come to me,” he said.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.