Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris each claim they helped to revive American manufacturing and that the other has hurt it. And they both select cherry-picked data points to underscore their arguments.
The reality is that the manufacturing report cards for the Trump and Biden administrations are mixed. We’ll sort through some of the spin coming from both camps.
Here’s Trump’s version, from a rally last month in Pennsylvania:
Trump, Aug. 19: Together, we will reclaim our nation’s destiny as the No. 1 manufacturing superpower in the world. … We had that going at a level that nobody had seen before. … Some facts that are interesting. The year before I took office, the United States lost over 10,000 manufacturing jobs. Everybody said you’d never bring it back. But under my leadership, we created more than a half a million manufacturing jobs in less than three years. … And under Kamala, we have fallen into manufacturing recession with 13,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the United States since just the start of this year.
And here’s Harris’ version, from a campaign event in North Carolina just days before President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race:
Harris, July 18: Donald Trump tries to claim he brought back American manufacturing. The fact is, under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. … Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and I have created nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs — so much so, it’s been described as a “manufacturing boom.”
Other Democrats have also weighed in.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on the first night of the Democratic convention, said, “Trump talked big about bringing back manufacturing jobs, but you know who actually did it? President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.”
And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg leveled this claim about Trump’s record during a July 28 interview on Fox News: “Even before the pandemic, America went into a manufacturing recession.”
Both sides were measuring the state of U.S. manufacturing in terms of jobs. There are other measurements, such as productivity, real output and wages relative to nonmanufacturing jobs. But since both sides mentioned jobs, let’s start there, with the data supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Manufacturing Jobs Under Trump
Trump came into office in January 2017 on the heels of what Forbes called an “industrial mini-recession in 2015 through much of 2016.” Trump rightly noted that there was a loss of manufacturing jobs in the year before he took office. There was a loss of 7,000 manufacturing jobs in 2016, measuring from December 2015 to December 2016. (Trump rounded up to 10,000 jobs.)
However, Trump didn’t mention that the number of manufacturing jobs had been steadily increasing for nearly six years prior to leveling off in 2016 — rising by more than 900,000 jobs after the Great Recession. The manufacturing jobs lost in the Great Recession have still not been recovered.
In Trump’s first two years, the economy added 462,000 manufacturing jobs. But that growth leveled off in 2019. In fact, for the full year in 2019 — before the pandemic-fueled recession hit — there was a loss of 43,000 manufacturing jobs. That’s what Buttigieg was referring to when he said that “even before the pandemic, America went into a manufacturing recession.”
The effects of the pandemic, of course, resulted in major jobs loss, including nearly 1.4 million in the manufacturing sector between January and April of 2020. About 770,000 of those manufacturing jobs had returned before Trump left office. But the combined job losses in 2019 and 2020 resulted in a net loss of 188,000 manufacturing jobs at the end of Trump’s presidency.
Manufacturing Jobs Under Biden
When Biden took office, manufacturing jobs continued to ride the post-pandemic recovery bump. In Biden’s first two years in office, there was a gain of 754,000 manufacturing jobs. By mid-2022, there were more people employed in manufacturing than before the pandemic, according to the BLS.
As of July, the latest month of available data, the U.S. has added 765,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden. The manufacturing employment level in July is 173,000 more than the pre-pandemic figure in February 2020. (Those numbers may soon change in ways that will markedly change the Biden administration’s record. Preliminary estimates of annual revisions to the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March indicates that the BLS’ monthly estimates may have overshot manufacturing jobs by 115,000. Instead of a gain of 19,000 manufacturing jobs that year, revisions may put that at a 96,000 job loss.)
But as was the case under Trump, the rise in manufacturing jobs stalled in Biden’s third year in office. Between January 2023 and July 2024 — the latest data available — there has been a gain of just 11,000 manufacturing jobs. And from January through July of this year, as Trump said, there has been a loss of 13,000 manufacturing jobs. (And it will likely be more than that after the BLS issues its final revisions in February.)
In other words, the trend under both Presidents Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth after an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.
Comparing the raw numbers, Biden has seen an average monthly increase of 18,200 manufacturing jobs per month, compared to 11,600 per month pre-pandemic under Trump. (And again, revisions are likely to lower Biden’s average monthly gain, though it would still be higher than under Trump.)
Other Measures of Manufacturing
There are, of course, other ways to measure the health of the manufacturing sector in the U.S.
“It’s a bit tricky to talk about manufacturing because we’ve seen such different trends in employment versus output,” said George Washington University economic professor Tara Sinclair, pointing to a Pew Research Center report about the long-term trend of manufacturing output rising as jobs have disappeared.
“I usually use industrial production rather than employment to capture output,” Sinclair told us via email. “It’s true that industrial production started falling after peaking in September of 2018. There were gains from 2016 to 2018, but that was recovery from the much discussed manufacturing recession of 2015-2016.”
Under Biden, industrial production rose until the fall of 2022 and has remained relatively stagnant ever since, according to Federal Reserve data.
The trade deficit for manufactured goods has generally gone up under both presidents, Robert Atkinson, president of Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told us via email. And manufacturing labor productivity growth “has been terrible under both administrations.”
A February 23, 2023, report from Ian Clay of ITIF noted that while the U.S. economy had added 830,000 manufacturing jobs in the first two years of the Biden administration, “Productivity (measured in real output per hour of labor) in the manufacturing sector is lower today than two years ago.”
Atkinson also noted that manufacturing job creation has lagged overall job creation. According to the BLS, under Biden, the growth of manufacturing jobs (6.28%) has been slower than overall job growth (11.06%). The same was true under Trump, even when looking only at his first three pre-COVID-19 years, when manufacturing job growth (3.39%) lagged overall job growth (4.4%).
“Neither administration did particularly well there,” Atkinson said. “Also, the manufacturing wage premium over non-manufacturing jobs has been steadily falling.”
A 2022 Federal Reserve paper that explored the reason for differences in wages between manufacturing and other sectors found that “the manufacturing wage premium—the additional pay a manufacturing worker earns relative to a comparable nonmanufacturing worker—disappeared in recent years.”
“So overall, neither party should claim any credit regarding manufacturing,” Atkinson said.
Alan Tonelson, a longtime analyst of U.S. manufacturing policy who blogs at RealityChek, told us different measures of the health of manufacturing present different pictures.
“Both administrations have taken important steps in building the policy infrastructure needed for a significant U.S. manufacturing comeback,” Tonelson told us, though through different strategies: Trump via tariffs and deregulation and Biden via government incentives.
Under Biden, there have been significant investments in factory-building. The Inflation Reduction Act included tens of billions for clean energy development, and the CHIPS Act provided $39 billion to fund manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and $11 billion for semiconductor research and development.
Indeed, Bureau of Economic Analysis data show private investment in manufacturing is way up under Biden, rising about 90% since the fourth quarter of 2022. But it may take years for those investments to show up in manufacturing job data.
“There is certainly a lag of some time,” Tonelson said. “It takes time to build factory structures, to get in all kinds of necessary equipment and then to hire workers.”
Ultimately, he said, “we’ll have to see what the actual level of demand for these products is.” For example, he said, the demand for electric vehicles is not as hot as once expected. And whether the semiconductors built in the U.S. will be able to compete with those manufactured in Taiwan remains to be seen.
“There are so many things in flux right now,” Tonelson said, such as the lingering effects of the pandemic, “It’s difficult to assess the health of manufacturing.”
“We will have to wait quite a while longer before we see the full effect,” of things such as Trump’s tariffs, the investments under Biden and the pandemic, Tonelson said.
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