Shortage of manufacturing talent threatens Trump's reshoring push - WaPo

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Skeptics see the current manufacturing weakness as evidence that the president’s plans are ill-conceived, though tariffs helped shrink the U.S. trade deficit by nearly one-quarter in August, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the real payoff will come next year, as new factories begin operating and the administration’s tax legislation encourages additional investment.

He could be right. Annualized spending on new factories, though down from its peak last year, is at nearly three times the pre-pandemic average. But Trump has killed many of the Biden administration’s clean-energy subsidies that encouraged such spending, and many observers have doubts that all of the new foreign investment the president claims from his recent trade deals will ultimately materialize.

The administration insists that there will be enough workers to staff the factories it expects in Trump’s “Golden Age.” But some of the new factories are running into familiar problems: One of the signature projects of the Biden era, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s new computer chip plant in Phoenix, was delayed by a year because of “an insufficient amount of skilled workers with the specialized expertise required,” according to the company’s chairman.

The president and his aides have offered varying explanations for how the overall shortfall will be addressed, including automation, high-skilled immigration and attracting Americans who are currently on the margins of society back into the labor force. Bessent has suggested that machines will do much of the work in the new factories, a solution at odds with the president’s vow to deliver “hundreds of thousands” of new jobs for his blue-collar base.

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Some young people have chosen higher education over work. Others’ employment prospects are hobbled by criminal records or the inability to pass a drug test. Some people get by with earnings from gig work or informal jobs that are not captured by government statistics. Many older workers who are inactive suffer from disabilities. But tapping Americans who have left the labor force because of illness or incarceration is a high-risk strategy that is unlikely to succeed, many economists said. Skills atrophy after people leave the workforce. Many who do often have substance abuse problems or other issues that make them a poor fit for work alongside high-powered machinery.

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