Here Is Why Trump’s Tariff Strategy Won’t Return Manufacturing Jobs

The latest jobs numbers were a surprise: 228,000 jobs instead of the expected 140,000. Unemployment went from 4.1% to 4.2%, but that’s deceptive as those are rounded; the actual unemployment rate was flat, going from 4.14% in February to 4.15% in March.

What wasn’t surprising was where the new jobs came in and, more importantly for this discussion, where they didn’t. The biggest increases were in healthcare (54,000), social assistance (24,000), retail trade (24,000), and transportation and warehousing (23,000).

Manufacturing, however, rose by roughly 1,000 month-over-month. February was up 8,000 over January, which in turn was down 7,000 compared to December 2024.

Manufacturing Never Went Away

As the return of manufacturing to domestic shores is a, if not the, major proffered reason for President Trump’s tariff strategy, one might wonder when things would turn around. When the rippling of muscles under sweat-stained shirts would redeem the economy and bring prosperity back to the middle class and those lower on the economic ladder.

This has become a social trope. All the jobs went away because government-enabled industries sent them overseas. A manufacturing foundation was stripped from the country, leaving the U.S. weak and at the mercy of other nations.

What few in the public seem to know — and many in industry and politics either don’t realize, or don’t admit — is that manufacturing didn’t disappear. Measured by production, the U.S. makes and builds things at historically high levels.

Below is a graph of industrial production, including manufacturing, mining, and electrical and gas utilities, from January 1919 through February 2025.

All this is indexed to annual manufacturing in 2017, so there are no issues of inflation that artificially and incorrectly make current production look higher. It just is.

The types of manufacturing have changed over time. Is the U.S. a major home for commodity-level nails and screws, toasters, cheap lawn mowers, and the like? No. Instead, as an economist mentioned in a recent conversation, the U.S. has done exactly what it’s supposed to do in economic theory. In other words, the point is to manufacture more sophisticated products and materials that allow higher prices and more expensive labor and other resources. Less developed nations take up the manufacturing of lower-end products, and the more developed ones acquire assemblies, materials, and finished products.

Looking For Manufacturing Jobs

Companies in the U.S. did keep manufacturing jobs in the U.S., only not as many as it had. The design and production tools include a lot of automation from artificial intelligence (the many types that have been in use for decades) and robotics.

Here is a graph, again from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED site, showing existing manufacturing jobs and open positions.

There was a massive loss of 8,114,000 jobs, from 19,553,000 in June 1979 to 11,439,000 in February 2010. That was a drop of 41.5%. In March 2025, the number grew to 12,764,000, but that’s far from the days of glory.

There are periodic stories of how many advanced manufacturing jobs are open and waiting for employees. But the positions typically require additional math and technical training. People also must be willing to do that work.

In addition, the lower part of the graph shows the number of open jobs, which is not only tiny in comparison to the number of existing jobs but seems fairly stable except after the pandemic recession, at which point it jumped and then settled back again.

Even if there were greater reshoring and companies brought more manufacturing back to the U.S., assuming there were enough people willing to do it, it typically takes a few years to build, equip, and make operational a new factory. And as fiction author Daniel Friedman said on X née Twitter, if a Democrat gets elected as president in 2028, the tariffs might be eliminated and the new factories no longer economically viable.