WATERBURY – Sitting on a meeting table at Platt Brothers and Co., Monday was a small, dense metal bar that was a sample of a product that performs a big job.

David W. Miecskowski, president and COO of the company, explained to U.S. Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., that the zinc and steel bar, called Plattline, is installed along underground fuel pipelines where they run under power line towers, and act as a grounding rod, drawing the electro-magnetic charge away from the pipe.

Then, David Berardinelli, Platt Brothers' sales manager, showed Murphy some cell phone photos of cheap knockoff of Plattline imported from China. It was falling to pieces.

"God forbid that gets in the ground," Berardinelli said. "Then the whole system fails and then you got a lot of problems."

Those problems could include, Miecskowski said, wildlife being killed, people being injured or killed, and holes in the pipeline that could lead to environmental damage.

For more than two centuries, Platt Brothers has operated a zinc mill in Waterbury, and has manufactured Plattline since the 1950s.

But company officials said they've been feeling the pinch from foreign competition recently.

That could be avoided, Murphy told the executives, if President Donald Trump follows a list of recommendations Murphy sent him today that would restore what he said are weakened requirements that federally funded or permitted projects only buy American goods.

"We worked the past couple weeks on this and we put together five recommendations where he could use executive orders to put some meat on this rhetorical argument of making things in America," Murphy told the executives. "I hear him loud and clear. It's not just in the trade deals. It's about decisions that you make in the procurement process."

Murphy, who in 2015 introduced a bill that would make the 1933 Buy American Act significantly stricter in favor of U.S. goods and services being purchased by the federal government for federal projects, said over the decades the law has been circumvented by loopholes and flat-out noncompliance.

In his letter, he tells President Trump he was "heartened" to hear the commitment he made in his inaugural address to buying and hiring American.

His five suggestions to the president are to (1) appoint a government-wide overseer of domestic purchasing police, (2) conduct a government-wide audit of purchases that are subject to domestic content requirements, (3) require A "Jobs Impact Assessment" on large purchasing contracts that would detail how many American jobs would be created by a project, (4) require contracting personnel to do an exhaustive search for domestic suppliers before approving Buy American waiver requests, and (5) create a centralized government website that lists all Buy American waivers from every agency.

Murphy acknowledged he and Trump do not meet eye-to-eye on much, but he sees some common ground between himself and the president on this issue.

He said he planned to request a meeting with Trump to follow up the letter.

"I think you're going to start to see the Trump administration start to permit a lot of these pipeline projects that have been stopped by the Obama administration, and here's a perfect opportunity for him to make good on his 'Buy America' promise," Murphy said. "He will upset people by permitting some of these controversial pipelines, but if he applies Buy America requirements to them, that puts people to work and it might offset some of the anger around the permitting."

Later, Murphy addressed most of Platt Brothers' 99 employees in a Town Hall session, telling them it's unfair they need to compete with overseas companies for manufacturing contracts from federally supported projects.

"It makes no sense that we're buying something for the military, that those contracts, which are paid for by our taxpayer dollars, go to overseas companies," he told them. "Donald Trump doesn't have to wait for an act of Congress. He can take some immediate steps right now to put some teeth back into the Buy American requirements."