Contact Jordan LaPier Director (202) 495-3320 jlapier@ourpublicservice.org Dedicated feds behind the scenes made major trade agreement possible June 17, 2020 Earlier this year Congress passed and the president signed a trillion-dollar new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. You might ask how’d they do that? It wasn’t the politicians that figured out the thousands of details. That took a dedicated team of career feds. In this case, John Melle and Maria Pagan of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Both are finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. John Melle is the assistant U.S. trade representative for the western hemisphere, he joined Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk about their work.