Just before President Trump announced his sweeping tariffs on “Liberation Day” last spring, the White House celebrated February’s gain of 10,000 manufacturing jobs, noting that more than 100,000 positions in the sector had been shed in the final year of the Biden administration.
“Manufacturing is Roaring Back,” the White House website declared.
But such gains were short-lived. Manufacturing jobs began to slide again in May and haven’t stopped declining. 72,000 manufacturing positions have been lost since April’s tariffs announcement, including 8,000 roles in December alone.
What gives?
“What we’re seeing is certainly a continuation of trends that began before the Trump administration,” Gordon Hanson, an economist and professor in urban policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Yahoo Finance. “But the tariffs haven’t helped.”
Indeed, millions of manufacturing jobs have disappeared from the US since 1979 amid a combination of “powerful” trends, Hanson said, including automation, “the continuing effects of the China trade, and the fact that the US has not done a lot of the things you need to do to restore manufacturing prowess.”
Tariffs are hardly the solution to those problems, Hanson said — though Trump insists otherwise. He vowed in April that jobs and factories would “come roaring back into our country” as levies on imports boosted locally produced goods.
While tariffs do reduce import competition, they can also increase the cost of key components for domestic manufacturers. Take US electric vehicle plants that rely on batteries made with rare earth elements imported from overseas, for instance. Some parts simply aren’t made in the United States.
As for sectors that had already largely left the US, like apparel and textile manufacturing, “a lot of those industries are just substantially gone,” Hanson said, meaning there aren’t many existing factories where production could be ramped up and hires could be made.
Manufacturing is hardly the only industry to add few workers these days: Job growth remains paltry across the board, and what hiring does exist is largely being driven by the healthcare and social assistance sectors.
‘Difficult for businesses to plan’
Then there’s the uncertainty caused by the administration’s whipsawing tariff policies, which can lead employers to pull back on hiring as they await greater clarity.
“If Trump just picked a number — whatever it was, 10% or 15% to 20% — we might all say it’s bad, I’d say it’s bad, I think most economists would say it’s bad,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said. “But the worst thing is there’s no certainty about it.”
Trump’s tariff threats against several European nations as he sought control of Greenland, for example, appeared and abated within a matter of days, injecting some volatility into the stock market in the process.
With rates “constantly changing, what becomes very difficult for businesses is to plan,” Baker added. “I think you’ve had a lot of businesses curtail investment plans because they just don’t know whether the plans will make sense.”
Manufacturing job losses could also be more severe than they appear in preliminary data. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in December that federal statistics may have overstated job growth by “about 60,000” per month.
It’s “too early to say with any certainty” that these manufacturing jobs would be around if not for the tariffs, Baker noted, but there’s also “zero evidence” that they came charging back.
Can manufacturing come back?
To be sure, the Biden administration also claimed a renaissance in manufacturing jobs, but that was after massive job destruction in 2020. Though employment in the sector eventually jumped above pre-pandemic levels, the growth was uneven regionally and lagged growth in other sectors, the Economic Innovation Group said in a 2024 analysis. Still, spending on manufacturing construction boomed following the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, 2022 CHIPS Act, and 2022 inflation reduction bill.
That spending declined in 2025.
But, tariffs or no tariffs, a manufacturing employment boom would be difficult to construct.
As a country develops, manufacturing might first rise as a share of employment, but “in every single industrial economy” it declines steadily after a certain point, Robert Lawrence, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professor of international trade and investment at the Harvard Kennedy School, said.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a trade deficit or a trade surplus,” Lawrence said.
Consumers use the money they save on cheaper goods and spend it on services, where there’s more employment growth. That’s what’s happened in the US, where payroll gains for 2025 were concentrated in services like healthcare, food services, and social assistance.
“I think this is deep,” Lawrence said. “We’ve tried industrial policy, we’ve tried trade protection — even before Trump’s initiatives and Liberation Day tariffs — and we haven’t seen much recovery at all. If anything, it continues to decline.”
