The Reshoring Lie
Trump’s tariffs were supposed to force manufacturers back to American soil. Instead, a documented pattern of U.S. companies is doing the opposite — cutting domestic jobs, expanding foreign operations, and passing the costs on to consumers. The data is not ambiguous. The companies are named.
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Analysis
On August 6, 2020, Donald Trump stood on a factory floor in Clyde, Ohio, and made a promise to the workers of Whirlpool. He had just signed a tariff on imported washing machines. The factory was booming, he told them. His trade policy was working. “Your company became a shining example,” he said, “of how tough trade policies and smarts can bring jobs and prosperity into communities like Clyde.” He told them he would “have your back 100 percent.” The crowd roared.
In March 2026, 341 workers were laid off from Whirlpool’s Amana, Iowa facility — the second round of cuts in less than a year at the same plant — as the company simultaneously expanded a new $160 million manufacturing complex in Mexico. A second wave of layoffs is expected before the end of 2026. Union officials estimate the Amana workforce, which stood at more than 3,000 employees just five years ago, could fall below 600 by year’s end. The jobs didn’t come back. They went south.
This is not a story about one company. Whirlpool is the most documented case, but it is part of a pattern that runs across American manufacturing — a pattern that exposes the central premise of Trump’s tariff policy as something the data does not support.
The Theory vs. The Behavior
The logic of tariff-driven reshoring is straightforward: raise the cost of importing goods enough, and companies will find it cheaper to manufacture domestically. Trump has stated this reasoning in nearly identical terms at every factory stop, every press conference, every Truth Social post on the subject. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” he said in April 2025, the day he announced the Liberation Day tariffs.
The Institute for Supply Management surveyed manufacturing leaders at the end of 2025. The results were a direct refutation of the theory. Sixty-four percent of manufacturers said they had no intention of reshoring production to avoid tariff costs — “despite the hope of the administration that this would drive manufacturing to reshore,” as the ISM’s own analyst noted. Of that group, a significant portion said they were actively seeking production partners in countries with lower tariff exposure: not America, but different parts of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The Reshoring Institute — a nonpartisan organization whose explicit mission is to return manufacturing to the United States — found that one-third of U.S. equipment manufacturers were planning to move production offshore after Liberation Day. The organization that exists to cheer for reshoring was documenting the opposite.
The reason is not complicated. Reshoring a factory is not a quarterly decision. It requires capital expenditure that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, construction timelines measured in years, workforce development pipelines that don’t exist overnight, and supply chain rebuilds that take longer still. A tariff that might be reversed by a court, a Congress, or the next administration is not a sufficient reason to make that commitment. The ISM survey found that 59 percent of manufacturers said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s machinery investment deductions had no effect on their capital spending plans. Twenty percent said they were actually reducing capital expenditures.
They’re increasing the Mexican footprint while they’re depleting the American workforce.
— Sam Cicinelli, Midwest General Vice President, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers
The Companies, By Name
The abstraction of survey data becomes concrete when you look at specific companies making specific decisions in real time. The following is not a comprehensive list. It is a sample of publicly documented cases drawn from regulatory filings, earnings calls, and union testimony.
| Whirlpool Corporation — Amana, Iowa |
|---|
| America’s largest appliance manufacturer — and the company Trump used as a backdrop for two separate factory speeches — filed WARN Act notices with Iowa Workforce Development in April 2025 for 651 workers, ultimately cutting 250. It then announced a second round of 341 layoffs effective March 9, 2026, with a third wave expected by mid-year. Simultaneously, Whirlpool opened a new $160 million facility in Mexico in August 2025 and has expanded its Mexican workforce toward 13,000 — up from approximately 11,500. The Amana plant, which produced refrigerators under the Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Maytag, and Amana brands, has gone from five assembly lines to one, operating a single shift. Iowa Democrats noted in a legislative letter that, since 2006, the state has provided Whirlpool with $21.5 million in grants, tax credits, and infrastructure assistance. During that same period, the company invested more than $1 billion in its Mexican operations. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the Amana layoffs. Whirlpool did not comment on the union’s complaints about offshoring. |
| Direction of jobs: Iowa → Mexico |
| Stanley Black & Decker — New Britain, Connecticut |
|---|
| The world’s largest toolmaker faced an estimated $800 million annualized tariff cost impact in 2025, and responded by doing precisely what the tariff policy was designed to prevent. Rather than reshoring, Stanley Black & Decker announced it was moving production out of China — not to the United States, but to Mexico and other lower-tariff countries. The company’s CEO was explicit on an earnings call that it was “unlikely that we’re moving a lot back to the U.S.” The company set a target of reducing its Chinese manufacturing footprint to less than 5 percent of supply by the end of 2026, with that production redistributed to Southeast Asia and Mexico, not American factories. It raised consumer prices by high single digits in April 2025 and announced a second round of increases for late in the year. Raw material costs for manufacturing inputs rose 5.4 percent in 2025 and were projected to rise another 4.4 percent in 2026. |
| Direction of jobs: China → Mexico / Southeast Asia (not U.S.) |
| Automotive Sector — Multiple Companies |
|---|
| U.S. auto tariffs added $30 billion in costs to the automotive industry in 2025 alone, producing a 10.4 percent increase in average vehicle prices according to Kelley Blue Book data. Toyota — one of the largest employers at U.S. auto plants — projected $9.1 billion in tariff-related costs for the fiscal year ending March 2026. The three major Detroit automakers collectively absorbed $6.5 billion in tariff costs in 2025. While domestic production did tick upward to 54.4 percent of all new vehicles sold, analysts noted that automakers like Toyota and Stellantis were making investments that had been planned well before Liberation Day — and that the “lack of policy consistency has made it challenging for companies to commit” to deeper production shifts. Volvo announced 3,000 global job cuts, citing tariff pressure, and withdrew its financial guidance for 2025 and 2026 entirely. |
| Direction of costs: Borne by American consumers at $1,600–$8,900 per vehicle |
The Ripple Is Real
The Whirlpool story in Iowa is also a story about what happens to the surrounding economy when an anchor manufacturer leaves. In Kalona, Iowa, Engineered Plastic Components — a plastics injection molder that supplied parts to the Amana plant — posted a notice on its doors in February 2026 announcing it was consolidating its Kalona facility with a plant in Grinnell because of the Whirlpool layoffs. Its largest customer was leaving. It had no choice but to follow. A 31-year Whirlpool employee named Sandra Freytag told reporters at a union gathering that these layoffs are different from previous cycles: “They are laying those people off because that product has stopped and discontinued. So there won’t be jobs for those people to come back to.”
Iowa’s workers face the additional indignity of a state unemployment system that was cut from 26 weeks of benefits to 16 in 2022, and workers losing their health insurance on the first day of unemployment. Iowa Democratic lawmakers introduced amendments to claw back corporate tax incentives from companies that offshore jobs — naming Whirlpool, John Deere, and Case New Holland specifically. Iowa’s Republican congressional delegation expressed disappointment but offered no legislative remedy.
Archive — August 6, 2020
— President Donald Trump, remarks at Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant, Clyde, Ohio. White House archives.
“Your company became a shining example of how tough trade policies and smarts can bring jobs and prosperity into communities like Clyde. I will always put American workers first. I will have your back 100 percent.”
The Admission Nobody Made
The administration has not been entirely without manufacturing success stories. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer toured Ohio and Michigan factories in April 2026 to showcase companies benefiting from tariffs. The companies he visited — including Whirlpool’s Clyde, Ohio washing machine plant and two drone manufacturers in Michigan — were, as CBC News noted in its coverage of the tour, already manufacturing in the United States before Trump’s tariffs were imposed. The tariffs did not bring them here. They were already here, and tariffs gave them a competitive advantage against foreign rivals who now face higher import costs. That is a genuine, if limited, effect. It is also a different claim than the one that was made on Liberation Day.
The claim on Liberation Day was that tariffs would trigger a broad reshoring of American manufacturing — that companies would look at the new cost structure and decide to build factories in the United States. The ISM survey, the Reshoring Institute data, the Whirlpool WARN filings, the Stanley Black & Decker earnings calls, and 83,000 missing manufacturing jobs all tell a consistent story: that is not what happened. What happened is that companies found it cheaper to absorb costs, raise consumer prices, or shift production to lower-tariff countries. The 64 percent who said they weren’t reshoring weren’t being unpatriotic. They were being rational.
Fortune published an analysis the day before this piece was filed, noting that higher input costs from tariffs actually make U.S. goods less competitive in export markets — pushing some manufacturers to relocate production abroad to stay viable in foreign sales. The tariffs intended to reduce trade deficits may, in certain sectors, be expanding them by driving production offshore.
In Amana, Iowa — population 482 — a plant that once employed 3,000 people is expected to have fewer than 600 workers by the end of this year. The refrigerators it used to make will now come from Mexico. The workers who made them were promised, twice, by the same president, that their jobs were protected.
The Reshoring Institute still exists. Its mission is still to bring manufacturing back to the United States. Its own survey data now documents the trend running in the other direction.
The factories haven’t come back. The promise is still on the White House website.
Sources: Reshoring Institute, 2025 Survey of U.S. Equipment Manufacturers; Institute for Supply Management, December 2025 Supply Chain Planning Forecast; Manufacturing Dive, “Whirlpool to Lay Off Over 300 at Iowa Plant” (Feb. 26, 2026); The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), “Whirlpool Layoffs in Amana Spark Outcry” (Feb. 26, 2026); Iowa Capital Dispatch, “Iowa Democrats Urge Whirlpool to Reconsider Layoffs” (Feb. 26, 2026); KCRG-TV9, “Whirlpool Amana Layoffs: 341 Workers Lose Jobs” (March 7, 2026); Supply Chain Brain, “U.S. Whirlpool Workers Decry Shift to Production in Mexico” (Feb. 26, 2026); CBS News, “U.S. Manufacturers Are Still Shedding Thousands of Jobs” (March 6, 2026); Manufacturing Dive, “Stanley Black & Decker to Raise Prices Again, Navigate $800M Tariff Impact” (July 30, 2025); Supply Chain Dive, “Stanley Black & Decker Tariff Mitigation Plan” (Nov. 2024); Digital Dealer, “Tariff Tracker: Impact on Automakers” (April 2026); CBC News, “These U.S. Companies Think Trump’s Tariffs Are Great” (April 14, 2026); Fortune, “Tariffs Alone Won’t Save American Manufacturing” (April 18, 2026); White House Archives, Remarks by President Trump at Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant, Clyde, Ohio (Aug. 6, 2020); Iowa Democratic Caucus letter to Whirlpool Corporation (Feb. 2026); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing employment data (2025–2026)
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