George Dewey was wondering what happened to the Buy American Act.

Dewey, president of J. Dewey Manufacturing, a small business in Oxford, CT, supplied gun-cleaning kits for federal air marshals. When the marshals needed more, the Homeland Security Department asked Dewey for the specifications. But when the contract was awarded, he learned that the low bidder was a Virginia company that imported its products from South Korea. The imports were priced about one-third less than Dewey’s kits.

While the contract was tiny—the winning bid was $44,000—Dewey was so disheartened that he didn’t want to go to work. “I lost my mind and started calling everybody in the world,” he said. As it happens, his local congressman, Democrat Chris Murphy, is the founder of Congress’s Buy American Caucus.

Murphy is introducing the Full Disclosure in Federal Contracting Act. The bill would require all solicitations to list all countries whose products could satisfy the contract, so American business owners know who they are bidding against.

Dewey told Set-Aside Alert that information would save him time, money and aggravation: “If I know that I was bidding against Vietnam and Thailand, forget it. I wouldn’t waste my time.”

“The Buy American Act is full of loopholes and that’s costing our state and country jobs,” Murphy said in a statement. “Waivers to the current law allow overseas companies to win contracts that would otherwise go to help American companies create American jobs. Our tax dollars should be going to American companies first.”

Many countries are exempt from the Buy American Act restrictions because they have signed trade agreements with the United States or are listed among the least developed nations.

One of Dewey’s suppliers, Charlie Pugliese, president of Sperry Automatics, says politicians talk about creating jobs while the government sends work overseas. “Everything we do, no matter how small it is, creates a job somewhere,” he told the Hartford Courant. “That’s the way you create jobs. That’s the way the government can help us out, but they don’t realize that.”