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President Donald Trump’s administration is taking credit for a manufacturing “renaissance” in the United States, though data on employment gains since he returned to office last January tell a less triumphant story.
Reviving and restoring America’s migrating manufacturing base was one of the marquee pledges of Trump’s successful 2024 campaign. And this aim has been used as a justification for many of his policies, notably tariffs but also his signature tax legislation—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—that was signed last July.
A new report from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has credited Trump, and his tax bill specifically, with giving manufacturers the “foundation, competitiveness and certainty to invest in new facilities and equipment, jobs and wage growth, cutting-edge research and our global competitiveness.” The report said that provisions within the legislation ultimately helped to spare 5.9 million otherwise doomed jobs, while also boosting economic activity.
The White House has been quick to hold up the report as evidence of “the undeniable power of President Trump’s America First economic agenda.”
But despite this conviction, payroll figures from the Department of Labor tell a slightly different story, with manufacturing employment having declined by 75,000 roles since his inauguration, compared to significant gains made under his predecessor.
The White House told Newsweek that there was “no comparison between President Trump and Joe Biden.”
Spokesperson Kush Desai said that Biden’s tenure “ended with a loss of over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in his last year,” and that Trump “reversed that Biden trend of manufacturing job losses, with a recent rebound in manufacturing job growth and continued robust factory construction job growth thanks to trillions of dollars in manufacturing investments.”
What Did Trump’s Bill Do for Manufacturing?
According to the White House, the OBBBA carried forward “bold, pro-growth polices,” including expensing of equipment and machinery purchases, deductions for research and development, write-offs for new and expanded factories, and “strong incentives to build in America.”
“The One Big Beautiful Bill introduces the most aggressive pro-manufacturing tax policy in decades – and it’s open to both domestic and international investors,” according to ARCO, a Georgia-based construction firm specializing in industrial and commercial projects. “By allowing companies to fully deduct the cost of new facilities, equipment, and R&D in the first year, the legislation turns long-term capital planning into near-term tax advantage.”
The Tax Foundation noted that the temporary nature of many provisions in the legislation meant that its benefits “will be limited,” but nevertheless called it “an important step” in improving tax treatment for manufacturers.
This saw it earn the backing of many trade groups, including the NAM, which notes that Congress “kept every one of the 10 major provisions for which the NAM advocated” in the final version of the legislation. While not formally aligned with either party, NAM’s policy priorities—lower corporate taxes, deregulation, and expanded energy production—have brought it into agreement with the Trump administration across several areas, even as it has remained skeptical of trade measures that raised input costs for manufacturers.
The report, however, contains scant details on how researchers came up with the estimates of “jobs protected” and “wages saved” at the state level and, in the words of trade expert L. Alan Winters, is “not research at all.”
“It is a series of anecdotes about good things that have happened in the last 12 months, but with no attempt to link them, except rhetorically, to the OBBB, no attempt to ask whether the investment or jobs might have been created there anyway and no attempt to ask what happened elsewhere,” Winters, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex and former chief economist at the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), told Newsweek.
“We’re given some aggregate numbers by state but with no evidence that I could see of where they came from and how they were derived,” he said.
Trump’s Manufacturing ‘Resurgence’: What the Numbers Show
According to the report, every state has seen a positive impact on employment from the OBBBA, and the White House says this proves Trump’s legislation has “delivered a powerful manufacturing resurgence in every state.”
However, Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called the report “completely out of touch with reality.”
“I have no idea how they came up with these numbers on jobs and wages,” he told Newsweek, pointing to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) showing that investment in factory construction has “slowed sharply since Trump took office.” Inflation rates and GDP growth, according to Baker, similarly prove that “you would be hard-pressed to find a single economic measure that has improved since Trump took office.”
Other industry groups have blamed the legislation for wiping out jobs in many sectors, such as the pro-clean energy advocacy group E2, which in a recent analysis estimated that this had cost the country nearly half a million jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in energy investments and tax revenue since being signed into law.
And payroll figures from the Department of Labor likewise show that manufacturing employment has declined rather than improved since Trump returned to office. The economy added around 3,000 manufacturing roles last month, though this modest gain is one of the few positive readings over the past year and a half.
All told, the economy has lost 75,000 manufacturing roles between January 2025 and June of this year. Over the same opening period of Joe Biden’s presidency, the economy had gained some 625,000. Payrolls did decline significantly toward the end of Biden’s tenure, however.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Daniel Orton and Sam Wilson.
Update 7/22/26, 11:41 a.m. ET: This article was updated with a response from the White House.
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