Trump’s Tariffs and Tax Cuts Spark Manufacturing Renaissance
By Peter Navarro | October 19, 2026 | American Greatness
America is in the midst of a manufacturing renaissance. Unprecedented in its speed, it is driven by Trump’s tariffs and factory-targeted tax cuts.
Companies can now expense 100 percent of the cost of building a factory on American soil instead of depreciating those costs over 39 years. The year you pour the concrete is the year you write it off. For a chief financial officer deciding where to build the next plant, that one provision changes the location decision.
The Trump tariffs are a protective wall. President Trump has said, If you are a foreign company and you want to avoid our tariffs, build here. Invest here. Hire here.
You can see the Trump manufacturing renaissance in the macro data, in the micro data, and along highways across flyover country.
Start with the macro. In the Biden administration’s last two years, America lost 230,000 manufacturing jobs. Since December 2025, American manufacturers have added 72,000 jobs, with factory payrolls rising in each of the last four months through September.
Through most of 2023 and 2024, the ISM Manufacturing Index languished below 50, the line between contraction and expansion. In January it climbed back above 50, where it has stayed for nine straight months.
Not coincidentally, construction employment has increased by 109,000 over the past 12 months. Before the first automobile or aluminum ingot rolls off the line, somebody has to pour the concrete, raise the steel, and install the machine tools. Look inside the construction numbers, and the growth is in nonresidential specialty trades—electricians, steel erectors, and pipe fitters. That’s factory construction, not housing.
Now the micro picture. A preliminary inventory of factory investments announced since Jan. 20, 2025, shows more than $380 billion in investment across more than 500 projects, with more than 160,000 announced direct manufacturing jobs.
Sixty-three are worth at least $1 billion. But the median project is roughly $90 million. This is not a few giant chip fabs. It is hundreds of smaller new factories and expansions spread across the country.
Nearly half are greenfield—new plants on new sites. The rest are brownfield: existing factories that have been expanded, modernized, or brought back into operation—the Rust Bowl is rising from the ashes.