One year ago today, President Donald Trump stood at a lectern in the Rose Garden, held up a booklet of trade barriers as thick as the Bible and told a crowd of people in suits and hard hats that with his planned tariffs, “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already.”
Those jobs and factories haven’t materialized, at least on the grand scale the president and his top advisers have promised.
Manufacturing payrolls actually declined slightly over the past year, with 98,000 fewer jobs year-over-year based on the most recent data from the Labor Department. There are 29,900 fewer auto manufacturing jobs and 18,000 fewer wood manufacturing jobs — both sectors the president has tried to protect with trade barriers. New, higher tariffs on steel and aluminum, moreover, have hindered the construction of factories. The industry’s hiring rate — often a reflection of confidence in the economic outlook — is lower now than it was at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The effort is there, the action is there, but is it actually accomplishing the goal they set out to do?” said Nick Iacovella, executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a pro-tariff group. “I think in that respect there is still a lot of work left to do.”
Trump’s protectionist industrial policy earned the backing of free trade skeptics on both ends of the political spectrum, including Democratic-leaning organized labor groups. But even many of those policy supporters have been dismayed by the administration’s chaotic rollout of new — and often shifting — duties and trade agreements, heightening uncertainty and making businesses hesitant to invest..
Voters also remain deeply frustrated with Trump’s handling of the economy — a CNN poll published Wednesday put the president at a career low 31 percent approval rating on that issue — and the public’s outlook on the labor market has soured.
“There’s no evidence that tariffs have had any positive impact on the economy, certainly in the way that the administration was promising a year ago,” said Martha Gimbel, a former Biden administration economist who’s now the executive director and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale. “Even if, in the long run, there are some sectors that have positive employment effects, the effect for most people is going to be higher prices.”
Tariff supporters say a year is too soon to completely turn around the U.S. manufacturing base, which has been in a period of steady decline since the 1970s amid foreign competition and cheaper labor overseas.
“We are talking about the short run here,” said Oren Cass, founder and head of American Compass, a conservative economic think tank. “There is no reason to expect that any long run benefits of reindustrialization would materialize in the first year.”
But they also see positive signs that Trump’s policies are slowing, if not reversing, the downward slide. Back-to-back Manufacturing PMI surveys, a monthly check-in on the status of the industry conducted by the Institute for Supply Management, have shown overall growth in the sector. And some of the manufacturers surveyed expressed optimism for the future, as the dust around tariff policy settles and companies move forward on massive investment pledges.
“Spring has sprung. It’s truly like the balm of Gilead,” a machinery manufacturing CEO told the Dallas Fed in its March survey. “After an extended period of ailment and woe, the healing has occurred and we are on our way to greater things. Our business growth thus far in 2026 is like a sweet fragrance that is healing our loss and hardship from prior years.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump promised on Liberation Day to lift up factory workers, writ large, through “reciprocal” tariffs on individual countries, based on the trade barriers those foreign capitals put on U.S. goods. The Supreme Court in February struck down those and other duties the White House imposed under a 1977 emergency law.
But the duties the president has levied on individual industries, through a different trade law, have proven more durable — and had a bigger impact on domestic manufacturing. They include the expansion of 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum that went into effect in March 2025 — and then doubled last June — as well as a 25 percent duty on imported autos and auto parts rolled out last spring.
“The Liberation Day reciprocal tariffs were designed to create leverage with other countries and raise revenue, not to reshore manufacturing,” said Iacovella, who was previously a staffer for Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “That’s not what their goal was, that’s not what they were meant to do.”
The tariffs on autos, steel and aluminum were also integral to the preliminary deals the administration reached with major trading partners, including Japan, South Korea and the European Union, all of which have major domestic auto industries that rely on sales to the U.S. The deals lowered their auto tariff rates to 15 percent.
But North American car companies have cried foul, pointing out that those deals made it cheaper to produce cars abroad than in North America, where American auto manufacturers are heavily reliant on parts and labor from Canada and Mexico and components can move across borders multiple times. A White House rebate program that allows car companies to reduce their tariff costs depending on how much of the car’s content is American-made has only partially eased their concerns.
“The policy landscape remains fragmented and, frankly, difficult to plan around” for automakers. Erin Keating, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, said during a recent sales forecast call. Even after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs — which affected other parts and materials not covered by the president’s auto tariffs — the temporary 10 percent tariff and country-specific duties “add more uncertainty.”
The debate over auto tariffs highlights the tension between the separate pillars of Trump’s trade agenda — as the U.S. sets out to craft deals and open up new markets with major trading partners, it potentially weakens the tariff wall intended to force companies to move production to the U.S. And the whipsaw nature of Trump’s tariff threats and dealmaking over the past year has contributed to a sense of uncertainty, making companies reluctant to invest until the trade landscape is more settled.
Chris Snyder, an executive director at Morgan Stanley who leads the bank’s research on U.S.-based industrial businesses, said that tariffs have led more manufacturers to invest in their U.S. operations, but it largely hasn’t materialized in the form of more jobs and factories for traditional industries. Instead, manufacturers are trying to maximize output from their existing facilities.
Orders for new machinery ballooned after Liberation Day, according to federal data, and industrial production has expanded. Tariffs and comparatively cheaper energy prices boost the case for bringing manufacturing onshore, Snyder said. But new facilities are unlikely to open so long as tariff rates remain unsettled.
“The biggest reason companies aren’t reshoring today is due to uncertainty around policy,” he said.
Other economic factors are also at play. Despite Trump’s sky-high tariffs on aluminum, production in the U.S. has slowed amid high energy prices, as the industry competes with AI.
“This shows the lack of planning on Trump’s part. It’s one thing to reshore businesses,” said Minnesota state auditor Julie Blaha, a Democrat. “I think we’d all like to see more businesses come back, but you can’t put up a major manufacturing plant as fast as a Spirit Halloween can go into an abandoned Joanne Fabric store.”
“The issue here is by the time we can see the effects of reshoring, of bringing corporate companies back, so many other companies will have gone out of business,” Blaha added.
But there are signs that the industry’s prospects could improve. ISM’s monthly survey of domestic manufacturers suggests the sector has expanded since the start of the year — including after war in the Middle East triggered an oil price shock. Even though manufacturing payrolls have contracted and the hiring rate is stuck in the mud, the number of available job openings has expanded over the last year, according to Labor Department data released earlier this week.
There is one industry that’s emerged as a clear winner under Trump’s second-term trade policy — steelmaking. Steel imports were down 12.6 percent in 2025, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, and jobs have increased over the past year. The industry has benefited from long-term gains — Trump imposed tariffs on steel from most countries in his first term and former President Joe Biden kept many of them in place, although he negotiated reductions with major allies.
Brandon Farris, the executive vice president of the Steel Manufacturers Association, called the tariffs a “game changer” for his industry.
They “have reshaped American steel manufacturing, boosting domestic output by 2.5 million tons, cutting imports, and driving over $25 billion in investment while helping to create tens of thousands of jobs,” Farris said.
But the steel industry, like most manufacturers, still has issues with recruiting a workforce. A poll by the libertarian leaning Cato Institute from last April found that while 80 percent of Americans think the country would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing, only 25 percent agreed that they would be better off if they worked in a factory.
And many of the same groups who have been bullish on the president’s trade agenda and its benefits for blue collar workers are growing frustrated at the lack of momentum.
Iacovella pointed to other sector-specific trade investigations the administration launched last year — but has yet to complete or hasn’t used to impose more tariffs. The Commerce Department launched 12 probes in 2025, but the administration has only imposed duties on a handful of those sectors: copper, heavy trucks and lumber, in addition to tariffs on steel, aluminum, autos and auto parts.
United Autoworkers President Shawn Fain — who backed aspects of Trump’s trade agenda — recently told his members that the president was falling short.
“We expect results,” he said at the group’s annual conference in February. “And after a year of big talk on trade from the president, we’ve still got … plant closures ripping through our membership. And not just our membership, working class people everywhere.”
