Editor's Note: The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
The Trump White House report on trade said that, for decades, the United States has shed jobs, innovation, wealth, and security to foreign countries that have used a myriad of unfair, non-reciprocal, and distortive practices to gain an advantage over our domestic producers. There is no better expression of this dangerous state of affairs than America’s large and persistent trade deficit in goods, which soared to $1.24 trillion in 2025.
To address the many trade issues, President Trump developed a plan called “The America First Trade Policy” that utilizes the authorities and expertise of the Federal government to ensure the enduring economic, technological, and military dominance of the United States. The new America First Trade Policy is based on production, not consumption.
I totally endorsed Trump’s America First plan to reshore manufacturing, reduce the trade deficit, retaliate against unfair foreign tariffs, and shift the economy from consumption to production.
Are companies reshoring production?
The census data in the following chart show that, as of May 2026, the reshoring boom has not materialized. U.S. manufacturing construction spending has steadily declined since 2024, driven by a 44% slowdown in spending on electronics factories and semiconductor fabs since their peak in mid-2024.
A study by Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, showed a significant gap between executive intentions and execution, specifically indicating that 81% of surveyed CEOs and COOs plan to bring their supply chains closer to home. But only 2% of these companies had fully completed their onshoring or nearshoring plans.
Manufacturing jobs go unfilled
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the U.S. manufacturing sector, job openings (representing unfilled positions) hovered between 443,000 and 510,000 in mid-2026. The chart below shows that the unfilled manufacturing job problem goes back to at least 2002.
Image created with Gemini by Google
Trump’s plan is not creating manufacturing jobs. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, America has lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs since President Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs.
The skills mismatch
One of the problems of reshoring is that America doesn’t have enough skilled workers. The most important skilled workers are in high-skill industries, such as machine shops, machine tools, mold making, tool and die, cutting tool accessories, semiconductors, forging, stamping, and foundries. These industries are critical to any reshoring initiative or any manufacturing renaissance because they support all other manufacturing industries. They are fundamental to the manufacturing process and are absolutely essential if we are to have a chance at growing domestic manufacturing or making any of President Trump’s programs work.
These eight industries have lost 10,902 plants and 421,217 highly skilled workers since 2001. A big part of these eight critical industries is now offshore, and we have lost the skills, know-how, operational competencies, and many of the highly skilled artisans who make the jigs, fixtures, dies, molds, cutting tools, gauges, castings, forgings, and stampings used in the manufacturing process of all other manufacturing industries.
The decline of these critical industries begs two questions. First, how can Trump’s plan to reshore manufacturing work if these critical support industries continue to decline? Second, where will we find these highly skilled workers?
You might be able to steal some skilled workers from competitors, but the pool of workers with these skills no longer exists. Replacing these workers or training highly skilled workers will require apprentice-style training.
Challenges with tariffs
President Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariff plan—originally rolled out in early 2025 but since struck down by the courts—was a sweeping trade initiative designed to overhaul U.S. import policies and support reshoring. Trump’s tariff introduction was haphazard and has been crippled by stop-and-start changes, shifting deadlines, and adjustments to tariff amounts. Trump’s tariff program would have been more efficient and less controversial if it had been focused on targeted industries and products to protect domestic production.
Why haven't multinational corporations invested more in re-shoring?
While many multinational corporations have announced significant domestic investments, broad-scale reshoring remains limited: they have not invested more in reshoring and are dragging their feet due to the following challenges:
- High Operational and Labor Costs: Moving away from countries with historically cheaper labor and production costs raises overall operating expenses.
- Reshoring manufacturing facilities and training the necessary workforce require years of lead time before reaching full-scale production.
- Multinational firms face a lack of available skilled labor.
- The tariff pressure is now off the corporations since the Supreme Court found them illegal.
- Corporations are concerned about policy unpredictability and the uncertainty caused by how Trump has implemented his tariffs and other programs.
Corporations want subsidies to reshore production
The Biden administration created subsidies through the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which offered billions in targeted tax breaks and grants to help corporations reshore production and save specific industries.
President Trump has significantly curtailed and rolled back the funding and tax credits originally provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The enactment of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" rescinded hundreds of billions in unobligated IRA climate grants and accelerated the phaseout of tax credits for electric vehicles, solar, and wind.
Capital investment
America’s multinationals have been investing more in their foreign businesses than in their domestic businesses. Research from the Roosevelt Institute shows that productive corporate investment has disappeared over the last 40 years and has been replaced by shareholder payouts. They say, “Whereas firms once borrowed to invest and improve their long-term performance, they now borrow to enrich their investors in the short run." The research showed that “In the 1960s and 1970s, an additional dollar of earnings or borrowing was associated with about a 40-cent increase in investment. Since the 1980s, less than 10 cents of each borrowed dollar has been invested.
Corporations want short-term investments like stock buybacks
Instead of increasing investments in plants, equipment and R&D, American corporations are mostly investing in buying back their own shares, thereby inflating stock prices so they can sell them at a quick profit. U.S. companies repurchased a record-setting total of $1.36 trillion in announced stock buybacks in 2025. The problem is: why should America’s corporations reshore production to the U.S. if reshoring will entail higher costs, when they can make so much more money, so much more quickly, with stock buybacks?
Stock buybacks were once largely illegal because they were considered a form of stock market manipulation. The concern was that companies, particularly those with insider knowledge, could artificially inflate their stock prices by buying back shares, potentially benefiting executives at the expense of other investors. But with heavy lobbying by Wall Street, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changed the Depression-era law in 1982 by introducing Rule 10b-18, which provided a "safe harbor" for companies engaging in buybacks, as long as they met certain conditions.
Conclusions
Jobs and factories “will come roaring back,” President Trump said following his April announcement to impose “retaliatory tariffs,” but it just isn’t happening.
Manufacturing jobs are going unfilled because young people do not see manufacturing as a good career field. They perceive manufacturing jobs as offering limited career growth, and many also see them as low-paying, monotonous and physically demanding. Many Americans aren’t interested in factory jobs because they often don't pay enough to lure workers away from service jobs like working at Amazon or driving for UPS.
For decades, both the government and corporations have been reluctant to fund apprenticeship training. In fiscal year 2024, manufacturing had only 95,000 registered apprentices (less than 1% of the 12.6 million manufacturing workers).
We can both create the highly skilled workers needed and recruit new workers by endorsing and funding long-term apprentice training, which offers:
- Funding a four-year training program shows the company is willing to commit to manufacturing in the U.S. and to its loyalty to its workers.
- The apprentice gets paid for learning, which provides immediate income and allows young people to earn a living while gaining valuable skills and experience.
- Apprenticeships are a pathway to careers in specific trades or industries, such as machining or tool and die, and provide practical skills relevant to the job market.
- The training is focused on their career field and avoids the upfront cost of tuition and the accumulation of student loan debt.
- Upon completion of an apprenticeship, individuals receive a nationally recognized credential, usually a certification, at which point they become journeymen.
- Some apprenticeship programs offer credits toward a college degree, allowing participants to pursue further education and potential supervisory roles within the company.
Trump signed an executive order to create one million registered apprenticeships. But many people are skeptical, including the National Skills Coalition, Workhands and Washington Monthly, who have raised concerns that budget cuts will ultimately reduce access for working-class learners and place too much burden on the private sector to compensate for the lost public dollars. The Trump administration has not directly secured large-scale congressional funding to reach the one-million-apprentice goal, leaving the creation of these apprenticeships largely reliant on existing programs and private investment.
President Trump’s apprentice program is inconsistent and contradictory, and the administration has not requested new, dedicated legislation to fund the ambitious one-million. To really make the apprenticeship program work, the administration needs a comprehensive plan that includes industry prioritization, a consistent revenue stream (rather than one-off grants and tax credits), and a real focus on workforce development, not the cutting of federally funded training programs.
Tariff program revival
President Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariff plan—which was originally rolled out in early 2025 but has since been struck down by the courts—was a sweeping trade initiative designed to overhaul U.S. import policies. To revive tariffs, the administration is trying to use Section 301 of the Trade Act to impose tariffs on 60 countries that allegedly fail to prohibit imports produced with forced labor. Trump also tried to use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to impose a global 10% duty, but the federal courts struck it down as unlawful.
If the Trump Administration wants to revive its tariff program by using tariffs to incentivize U.S. corporations to reshore production, it must convince corporations that the tariffs are permanent and that the government is in it for the long haul. To convince everybody, the government needs to develop specific objectives, tariffs by industry and product categories, and tariff percentages so that everybody, including U.S. corporations, foreign competitors, and foreign governments, can understand the new policy.
How will the Trump Administration incentivize American corporations to invest domestically and bring production back to the U.S?
President Trump is trying to incentivize corporations to bring production back to the U.S. using the following strategies:
- A proposal to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, specifically for companies that manufacture their products in America.
- Expansion of Research & Development (R&D) tax credits, re-instituted 100% bonus depreciation, and expanded expensing for new manufacturing investments.
- The implementation of aggressive, reciprocal tariffs (including a baseline import duty) to make domestic production more cost-effective than importing from overseas.
- Sweeping deregulation and expedited federal approval processes for large-scale investments—by bypassing bureaucratic delays.
- Directing massive incoming foreign financial commitments (such as investment pledges from Japan and Middle Eastern nations) toward priority sectors like semiconductors, critical minerals, and advanced technology.
While sweeping corporate tax cuts and deregulation can make domestic operations more profitable, they are typically insufficient on their own to offset the massive structural and labor cost advantages of manufacturing abroad. For large-scale reshoring in capital-intensive and strategic sectors, multinational corporations will likely continue demanding direct subsidies like those in the CHIPS and Science Act.
The Biden administration oversaw a combined authorization and investment of roughly $2.28 trillion across the three landmark pieces of legislation, though actual direct federal appropriations and grant spending account for about $1.52 trillion of that total.
After the Semiconductor industry successfully negotiated a $54 billion bailout from the government, more industries now want subsidies for reshoring production. Industries such as Automotive, Batteries, Medical Devices, Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals, Industrial Equipment, Shipbuilding and Aerospace. Since the Trump Administration significantly curtailed and rolled back the funding and tax credits originally provided by the Biden administration, it is an open question whether they would be supportive of subsidizing all industries that want subsidies. Many U.S. corporations are making this kind of subsidy a primary condition for reshoring.
What can be done to increase domestic investment and reduce stock buybacks?
Upton Sinclair once remarked, ”It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it”.
Getting corporations to pivot from stock buybacks to capital investment requires reshaping financial incentives. The most effective tools Trump could use to achieve this include:
- Repealing the SEC Rule 10b-18, which provides a "safe harbor" for open-market share repurchases.
- Change Corporate executive compensation by levying excise taxes or eliminating favorable capital gains treatments on stock repurchases.
- Increasing the Excise Tax on Stock Repurchases (currently at a 1% rate), thereby making buybacks more expensive and tilting the scale toward capital expenditures.
President Trump issued an executive order, "Prioritizing the Warfighter in Defense Contracting,” which penalizes major defense contractors from issuing corporate dividends, conducting stock buybacks, and paying excessive executive compensation. Will the Trump Administration be willing to stimulate corporate investment by repealing Rule 10b-18, eliminating favorable capital gains treatment on stock repurchases, or taxing repurchases? I don’t think it is likely that Trump will do this to his CEO friends.
President Trump began his second term with a bold program to change America’s free-trade policy by first correcting unfair and unbalanced trade and by bringing production back into the United States and under U.S. control. He launched his America First Program, along with an aggressive tariff agenda. With all the other problems swirling around the Trump Administration now, I wonder if Trump has the resolve or the interest to address them and get the America First program back on track? At this point, I wonder if Trump really knows the kind of economic order he wants to sustain in the future.
Michael Collins is the author of a new book, "The Globalization Trap," which is now on Amazon. He can be reached at [email protected] or on mpcmgt.net
