On the menu today: This is Dominic Pino filling in for Jim Geraghty. There will be no Morning Jolt tomorrow in observance of Good Friday.

A Reality Check for U.S. Manufacturing

There’s a lot of doom and gloom about U.S. manufacturing, with constant talk of how jobs only disappear, and we don’t make anything here anymore. The trend that these talking points describe is real, and it was very apparent from the late ’90s to the late ’00s, but it has mostly stopped.

When President Donald Trump has talked about the need for higher tariffs on imports of foreign goods because of a decline in American manufacturing, he has often made the claim that “90,000 plants and factories” in the U.S. closed after the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico took effect in 1994. But that figure is questionable, and experts say other factors, such as automation, had more to do with the large decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs than trade.

President Donald Trump plans to use tariffs in the coming days to pursue a range of disparate and sometimes conflicting goals, from pressuring neighboring countries on immigration and boosting domestic manufacturing to penalizing trade partners for their own tariffs. 

Critics, including longtime free-market economists and trade experts, have criticized Trump’s tariff plans as incoherent and economically damaging. 

President Donald Trump is granting a one-month exemption on his stiff new tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada for U.S. automakers, as worries persist that the newly launched trade war could crush domestic manufacturing.

The pause comes after Trump spoke with leaders of the “big 3” automakers, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, on Wednesday, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

President Trump announced Monday that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. plans to spend $100 billion on new manufacturing plants in Arizona.

TSMC is the world’s biggest semiconductor manufacturer, producing chips that are used by big-name companies like Apple and Intel in such items as computers, smartphones, cars and medical equipment.

Eli Lilly on Wednesday said it will invest at least $27 billion to build four new manufacturing sites in the U.S., as demand for its blockbuster weight loss and diabetes injections soars and the company develops new drugs for other conditions.

President Biden is blocking the proposed $14 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel.
"A strong domestically owned and operated steel industry represents an essential national security priority and is critical for resilient supply chains.  That is because steel powers our country: our infrastructure, our auto industry, and our defense industrial base. Without domestic steel production and domestic steel workers, our nation is less strong and less secure", Biden stated on Friday. 

President Joe Biden on Friday officially blocked the takeover of U.S. Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, making good on his promise to keep an industrial name that is more than a century old under domestic ownership.

Biden said the proposed $14.9 billion acquisition by Nippon would place one of the largest steel producers in the U.S. under foreign control, creating a risk for the nation’s critical supply chains.

President Joe Biden said Friday he is blocking a $14.3 billion acquisition of US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel, marking a significant use of executive authority in the closing days of his administration.

“As I have said many times, steel production – and the steel workers who produce it – are the backbone of our nation,” he said in a statement. “A strong domestically owned and operated steel industry represents an essential national security priority and is critical for resilient supply chains.”

Nippon Steel proposed giving the U.S. government a veto over any reduction in U.S. Steel’s “production capacity” in a last-ditch bid for President Joe Biden’s approval to acquire the venerable American steelmaker, according to a document sent to the White House on Monday.

The proposal is aimed at mollifying the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which warned last week that Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion takeover of U.S. Steel could lead to a decline in domestic steel output that would pose “risks to the national security of the United States.”