Trump’s reshoring push is tripping over itself

[Thiệu Ngô]

The president vowed to bring factories home. But tariffs, immigration policies and spending cuts are turning that promise into a costly balancing act.

By Megan Messerly

President Donald Trump is pushing manufacturers to bring factories home. His policies are punishing them when they try.

Tariffs meant to protect American producers are raising the cost of the very materials they need to expand their footprint in the U.S. New visa policies risk narrowing the talent pipeline needed for that expansion. And spending cuts pushed by White House budget hawks threaten some of the subsidies companies need to make bringing back jobs pay off.

Together, the policies underscore the limits of Trump’s sometimes improvisational approach to governing — and highlight a tariff regime more aimed at getting even than getting ahead. The result is an expensive balancing act that business leaders say is increasingly hard to navigate.

For example, tariffs have raised the cost of imported equipment such as training robots used in community-college labs, making it more expensive to train American workers the administration hopes fill these new jobs.

Spencer Pederson, senior vice president of public affairs at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, said manufacturers are “100 percent on board” with Trump’s goal of rebuilding domestic industry but find the administration’s policies sometimes working at cross-purposes with it.

“We just don’t want it to be a one-step-forward, two-steps-back solution,” said Pederson, whose organization represents more than 300 companies.

The White House has made it a top priority to bring jobs back from overseas, in everything from shipbuilding to semiconductor manufacturing. And Trump has secured promises of several trillion dollars from companies, some of them specifically aimed at bringing jobs back to America, including a $13 billion investment plan by carmaker Stellantis and a $1.5 trillion initiative from JPMorgan announced this week.

“I think we don’t get the credit we deserve. This is all much more thought out,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to share the administration’s thinking. “There’s a status quo … and obviously that’s why companies are profitable and making money, and I think folks don’t like any disruption to the status quo.”

Companies, considering large investments coveted by the White House, are contending with the impact of new sector-based tariffs, a Supreme Court review that will determine whether the president has unilateral emergency tariff power and the bigger-picture question of whether the tariffs outlive the current administration.

Several U.S. business leaders have described a paralytic effect, with companies unable to greenlight reshoring projects without more certainty.

“It’s frustrating because we’re the most American auto company, and we export the most, and yet, we have this $2 billion headwind, which prevents me from investing even more in the U.S.,” said Jim Farley, CEO of Ford Motor Company, at Ford’s Pro Accelerate Conference in Detroit earlier this year.

Similar concerns have been shared by Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz and Lucerne International CEO Mary Buchzeiger, among many others. Lucerne, for instance, decided to delay and scale down an aluminum forging project that would have reshored jobs in Michigan from China.

Some economists and conservative policy thinkers argue that Trump’s mix of tariffs and investment incentives is forcing a long-overdue recalibration of American industry — and may not have happened without Trump’s move-fast-and-break-things approach.

“I think it’s fair to say we are going through a valley,” said Harry Moser, president of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes and tracks reshoring efforts. “We’re getting over the hurdles with the uncertainty and inconsistent nature of the tariffs so far. The tariffs will eventually drive that behavior, but in the meantime, there’s pain.”

Moser said that higher import costs have been largely offset by generous tax breaks and immediate expensing approved earlier this year in the megabill. The result, according to the Reshoring Initiative’s data, is that manufacturing investments in 2025 are roughly equal to what they were in 2024.

“The president has always talked about, there’s going to be a transition here, but it’s necessary,” the White House official added.

To those who believe that Trump’s strategy is headed in the right direction, the turmoil is an unavoidable middle stage of a deeper transition following decades of free trade rules that led to offshoring and a hollowing out of the U.S. manufacturing base.

What’s less clear is whether the administration will be able to translate the president’s instincts into the kind of durable policy architecture that industrial renewal requires.

“You hit this inflection point where you’ve done the demolition, and the next step is to clean up and lay foundations and start building something, and that’s where we are right now,” said Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of American Compass, a conservative, economically populist think tank. Administration officials “deserve a lot of credit for doing a lot of the hard stuff they did out of the gate, but if it’s going to succeed, it needs to be followed by the actual, bottom-up, systematic, stable, structural new thing.”

“Whether or not they can make that transition is what everyone’s looking at,” Cass added.

Duties meant to push production home are driving up the cost of imported parts that U.S. factories depend on, particularly with autos, semiconductors and other supply chains where parts cross borders multiple times before a product is finished. Supporters of the president’s reshoring goals say that’s the point — squeeze imports to force domestic sourcing — but businesses counter that they can’t yet get those products at scale from U.S. manufacturers.

“The administration seems to be more of a ‘ready, fire, aim’ type of situation,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Their first gut impulse is on the tariffs and government equity stakes and other things, and they’ve somewhat ignored a lot of the supply-side impediments.”
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Domestic producers have also raised prices to match the costs of the newly tariffed foreign products. Domestic steel and aluminum manufacturers, for instance, raised prices in anticipation of new tariffs on their foreign competitors, causing ripple effects down the supply chain and in some cases incentivizing production outside of the United States, where steel remains cheaper.

“If you put tariffs on intermediate goods like semiconductors or auto parts, you are hurting American companies that are trying to export or, frankly, trying to reshore,” said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank focused on industry and technology policy. “If you had a more nuanced strategy, you wouldn’t make that mistake.”

And even as companies announce new plants and expansions in the U.S., many say they can’t find enough skilled workers to staff them. There are more than 400,000 open manufacturing jobs nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with shortages most acute in high-tech fields like semiconductors, robotics and advanced manufacturing.

That scarcity is colliding with new immigration policies that business groups fear will make the problem worse. Trump announced in September a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, which dramatically raises the cost to hire foreign workers and may deter businesses from sponsoring foreign engineers or technicians they need for expansion.

Industry groups warn the change could undercut the training pipeline Trump says he wants to rebuild, arguing that companies often depend on foreign engineers to transfer technical know-how to U.S. teams during plant expansion. Already, countries including Germany and China have made overtures toward skilled workers who might otherwise land in the U.S.

“We know how important the race for talent is,” said Jeff Wasden, president and CEO of State Business Executives, an association of state-level business leaders. “We want to ensure that these policies are not restrictive of hiring the amazing American talent that’s here, but at the same time, ensure that we aren’t closing the door to others from the global talent pool.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued the Trump administration Thursday over its decision to raise the H-1B visa fee, arguing Trump overstepped his authority in making changes to a Congressionally-approved program. The Chamber did not make anyone available for an interview for this article.

Trump has said that the $100,000 visa fee is meant to curb abuse of the program and ensure only high-value hires are made. White House aides argue the current tranche of H-1B visa holders are not the kind of people setting up advanced factories rather but lower-skilled workers like software engineers. They also note there are other visa programs for workers who truly have extraordinary abilities.

The money piece is its own contradiction: Trump frequently touts a multitrillion-dollar tally of investments businesses have announced in the U.S. since he took office, but budget hawks inside his administration are at the same time moving to pare back government programs that economists say would drive even more investment. Firms trying to plan multi-year builds say the subsidy landscape keeps shifting, leaving them modeling projects around incentives that may vanish before they break ground.

That tension extends inside the administration, where the Office of Management and Budget this year ordered a broad pause and review of federal grants and loans, a move that’s injected fresh uncertainty.

The Energy Department, for instance, earlier this month announced that it was terminating more than 300 clean energy awards worth more than $7.5 billion that it determined did not “adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” Industry officials also complain that awards under other, non-controversial pots of grant money, including for critical minerals and rare earth projects, have stalled as well.

White House officials argue that they have undertaken “necessary retooling or auditing” of federal grant programs that have existed for years. They also contend that “a few programs being paused or not paying out” is not reflective of the administration’s strong interest in supporting the development of critical minerals and rare earths domestically.

Labor unions share Trump’s desire to rebuild an American manufacturing base but are increasingly frustrated by the lack of a clear plan. The AFL-CIO, while supportive of protective tariffs, says the administration’s piecemeal approach has created as much confusion as confidence, leaving businesses, allies and unions alike guessing which version of “America First” they’re meant to plan around.

“What we need is a coherent strategy,” said Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international department. “We need to know how we’re going to get the critical minerals our manufacturing sectors need to continue to be cutting edge. We need a clear vision for how that’s going to be funded, how tariffs that are collected are going to be reinvested and really give a floor to working people in this country so that they can live with dignity and compete in the global economy.”

“You have this incoherent policy environment right now,” she added. “Tariffs alone can’t do the job.”