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President Donald Trump won office pledging to deliver an American manufacturing renaissance. Boosting manufacturing is a long-standing campaign promise for U.S. politicians, but Trump could have been the one to see it through.
Domestic manufacturing has been on a marked rise. Construction spending on U.S. manufacturing facilities has tripled since 2020 (to a whopping $234 billion), the clean-energy sector has announced more than 100,000 new manufacturing jobs since 2022, and the United States has reclaimed global leadership in critical industries, becoming the fastest-growing region for battery manufacturing and on pace to triple semiconductor capacity within a decade.
All the president had to do was let these trends play out. With the bulk of recent manufacturing projects set to come online in 2026, 2027 and 2028, this administration could have sat back and let the economic boom happen on its watch.
Instead, the president made clear that he cares more about making headlines and erasing his predecessor’s accomplishments than he does about everyday Americans. First, he illegally froze billions of dollars in manufacturing investments in critical sectors like semiconductors and batteries and gutted staffing at the federal agencies that administer these funds. Now, Trump’s tariffs on manufacturing inputs are decreasing manufacturing activity and driving prices to a three-year high for raw materials, machinery and auto parts. These tariffs will destabilize an American manufacturing sector that was just gaining steam, with countless factories and jobs hanging in the balance.
Economic development organizations, chambers of commerce and town councils—not Washington—did the hard work to build back from the wreckage of offshoring and generational disruptions of the pandemic. The president’s actions represent more than broken promises. They’re a slap in the face to communities that were just starting to see the fruits of their labor.
Indiana is a prime example. The Hoosier state engaged educational institutions and legacy industries for years to reposition the industrial Midwest’s infrastructure and workforce toward next-generation microelectronics. These efforts, including a research partnership between Purdue University and chips giant TSMC and a state-led microelectronics production task force, laid the foundation for the state to capitalize on future federal dollars. When Indiana earned a $4 billion SK Hynix semiconductor investment in 2024, U.S. Sen. Todd Young said, “The CHIPS and Science Act opened a door that Indiana has been able to sprint through.”
Now, the president is musing about “getting rid of” the CHIPS and Science Act—even as its investments are spurring an economic and jobs boom in Indiana.
Similar examples abound nationwide. Georgia leveraged a mix of local workforce programs and federal tax breaks to bring the QCells solar campus to Dalton. A combination of federally backed loans and state tax incentives helped the battery manufacturer Form Energy expand operations in the legacy steel town of Weirton, West Virginia. And the Arizona Commerce Authority was heavily involved in enticing TSMC and Intel to Phoenix with the support of more than $11 billion in CHIPS Act grants and loans.
If these grassroots efforts laid the tinder for the next golden age of American manufacturing, then Biden-era grants, loans and tax incentives provided the spark. But now, just as American manufacturing’s prospects were starting to burn brighter, Trump’s policies threaten to snuff them out.
This is the ultimate goal for a leader who pledged a manufacturing renaissance and the ultimate insult to towns across Indiana and the nation that have worked for years to make it possible. If the Trump administration wants to prove it is for the small-town worker and not the coastal billionaire, it must walk back these anti-manufacturing policies immediately.•
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Safford is associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists. Higdon was a former senior adviser for U.S. manufacturing at the Department of Energy.
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