August 12th, 2025
Last week, I gave an aide mémoire to the President and his team about a measure in the United States Congress that, if passed, would seriously damage the Philippine business process outsourcing sector. The United States Senate is now considering the “Keep Call Centers in America Act of 2025.” It is still a bill, not yet law, but the way it is being positioned and the fact that it is sponsored by both Senator Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, and Senator Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia, gives it bipartisan weight. In the current United States Congress, that kind of coalition makes eventual passage much more likely than most other bills.
In the aide mémoire, I spelled out the key provisions of the bill. It would require any United States company that intends to relocate call center work overseas to give advance notice to the United States Department of Labor. It would create a public list of companies that offshore call center jobs, and any company on that list would be barred for five years from receiving new United States federal grants, loans, or call center contracts. It would require every customer service agent to disclose their location to the customer, and to state whether artificial intelligence is being used in the interaction. The measure would apply to any firm with at least fifty full-time employees or the equivalent in call center hours, so this is not limited to the largest multinational companies.
I explained to the President that the Philippines, as one of the top destinations for United States call center outsourcing, would be among the most affected. However, I also stressed that our strongest argument in Washington is not simply the potential loss of jobs here. The more compelling case is that such a measure will raise costs for American consumers in sectors that are politically sensitive and closely tied to voter concerns.
Our preliminary analysis, which I attached to the aide mémoire, focused on two such sectors: healthcare and mortgage servicing. In healthcare, many hospitals and health systems in the United States use offshore call centers for scheduling, billing, insurance verification, and patient support. Using domestic labor for those functions would increase costs by over USD 136–166 billion annually for hospitals that currently outsource these services. In healthcare, 60–90 percent of such cost increases are typically passed directly to patients and insurers. This would result in tens of billions of dollars in higher bills every year.
The second sector, mortgage servicing, would see an annual cost increase of USD 97.76 billion if operations were forced onshore. The calculation is straightforward. Those costs, when distributed across approximately 50 million active mortgages in the United States, would result in an additional USD 1,955 per year for each mortgage. This is equivalent to an increase of USD 163 per month. Such an increase would push some mortgages from affordable to unaffordable for many households and could cool the housing market at a time when affordability is already a major political issue in the United States.
The aide mémoire also explained the method for arriving at these estimates. We compared the offshore fully loaded cost per call center agent, which is roughly USD 15,000 per year in the Philippines or India, with the average United States call center wage of USD 19.50 per hour. Multiplying this wage by 2,080 working hours per year and applying a multiplier of 1.3 to account for benefits and overhead gives a United States cost of USD 52,728 per agent per year. This represents a 251.52 percent increase compared to the offshore cost. When multiplied across thousands of providers and service centers, these differences create the nationwide cost impacts described above.
From there, I presented recommendations for the President’s approval. First, to instruct the Philippine Embassy in Washington to initiate quiet but sustained lobbying with United States legislators, their committee staff, and relevant industry stakeholders. Second, to frame our engagement in terms of the increased costs that Americans will bear in healthcare and mortgage servicing rather than focusing only on the benefits to the Philippines. Third, to mobilize client companies with substantial United States operations to speak about their reliance on Philippine services in maintaining competitiveness and quality. Fourth, to coordinate with the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines and the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines to compile industry data and present a unified position.
I emphasized to the President that time is of the essence. Once a bipartisan bill with such support clears its early committee stages, it becomes much more difficult to stop. Our advantage lies in the fact that we have credible quantitative evidence and a strong economic argument that keeping Philippine call centers is in the interest of American voters. To use that advantage effectively, we must engage before the measure gains unstoppable momentum.
That is why I concluded by saying that with his approval, we can act immediately to ensure our position reaches key decision-makers in Washington while the debate is still forming, allowing us to influence the outcome from a position of strength backed by thorough research.