The White House cites a dubious figure on “factories” lost since 2000.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler
“Our country has lost more than 5 million jobs in more than 90,000 factories due to devastating globalization over the last three decades alone. North Carolina lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs, including 60 percent of its furniture manufacturing jobs in the years following NAFTA. And in Michigan, globalist policies destroyed 250,000 jobs, including 40 percent of the auto industry.”
— White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, remarks at a news briefing, March 11
With worldwide stock markets plunging because of a trade war unleashed by President Donald Trump, the White House was quick to defend itself this week. Leavitt asserted that “we are in a period of transition from the mess that was created under Joe Biden” and claimed that Trump inherited a “country in an economic disaster.”
This is the kind of hyperbole one would expect from a White House spokesperson. Never mind that The Economist magazine, in a cover story that appeared a month before the presidential election, declared the U.S. economy to be “The envy of the world” — and that it had “left other rich countries in the dust.”
For the purposes of this fact check, we’re interested in the data that Leavitt cited to justify Trump’s tariff policies. “Despite the globalist mainstream media’s attempts to worry consumers, President Trump will not repeat the trend of past American presidents who broke their promises to the American public and smiled while they stuck a knife in the back of American workers and shipped their jobs overseas,” she said by way of introduction.
Where does this come from? And how accurate is it?
The Facts
At her media briefing, Leavitt celebrated that “the manufacturing sector gained 10,000 new jobs in just one month under President Trump.” During Trump’s first term, the White House counted jobs created from January, but this administration has chosen to start with February — perhaps because manufacturing jobs fell in January. But in any case, even the February number overlaps Biden’s term. So Trump can’t claim full credit yet.
A president takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. But for the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey, employers report data to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. In other words, the February number in essence shows jobs created (or lost) from Jan. 12 to Feb. 12 — or eight days of the previous president. We applaud the White House for citing the February number, but the first full month under Trump will be March. (This number will be revised two more times, so Trump shouldn’t count his chickens yet.)
In his first term, Trump and his team regularly claimed that Barack Obama lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs — a figure that stemmed from starting the count in January 2009, when the Great Recession was in full force. If you start counting in February, as many economists recommend, Obama over eight years actually had a modest gain in manufacturing jobs — 4,000.
At The Fact Checker, we are dubious about the practice of measuring job growth by presidential term. Presidents do not create jobs; companies and consumers do. This huge difference in a two-term presidency because of a one-month shift simply shows how mindless and arbitrary this game can be.
Now let’s look at Leavitt’s statistics.
“Our country has lost more than 5 million jobs in more than 90,000 factories due to devastating globalization over the last three decades alone.”
A White House official said the source was a 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The headline was: “We can reshore manufacturing jobs, but Trump hasn’t done it.”
According to the article — written by a now-retired EPI economist — “the U.S. has suffered a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants and nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs since 1997.”
The data in the article ended in 2018, so it’s seven years old, but the number of manufacturing jobs is roughly now where it was in 2018. Manufacturing jobs plunged during the pandemic, then climbed to the highest level since 2007 in February 2023 before sputtering and losing ground again in 2024.
One likely reason is that the big boom in durable-goods consumption during the pandemic (such as Pelotons and home office equipment) flattened out — and Biden’s big investments in infrastructure and chip manufacturing are still ramping up.
There’s no doubt that 5 million manufacturing jobs disappeared, starting around 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the 90,000 factories statistic is more dubious. Note that the report referred to “91,000 manufacturing plants” but it also uses the term “factories,” as Leavitt did.
The data comes from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics, which has a tool that breaks down the data. About a third of the manufacturing establishments employ four or fewer people, which hardly makes them factories. The manufacturing establishments with more than 500 people fell from 4,535 in 2000 to 3,316 in 2022. That’s a decline of about one-quarter, but the number (1,219) is much smaller than 90,000.
Regular readers may recall that Trump, in his first term, frequently bragged that he created 12,000 factories, including in his 2020 State of the Union address. When we checked that out, it came from a different data source — a BLS database set known as the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts the number of “establishments in private manufacturing.”
More than 80 percent of these “manufacturing establishments” employ five or fewer people and include bakeries, candy stores and custom tailors. This figure soared during Biden’s presidency, and there are now more manufacturing establishments, according to this metric, than in 2000.
In any case, it’s correct that manufacturing jobs have not recovered from the double whammy of trade deals with China and the Great Recession. Whether Trump’s tariffs would restore the jobs is dubious, according to the organization cited by the White House.
The employment-loss numbers “are about the job displacements associated with higher trade deficits,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at EPI, in an email. “These deficits are, in our view, definitely a problem. But we’d also argue that they are a problem that will not be effectively addressed with large, across-the-board increases in tariffs. Large, across-the-board tariffs have no real chance of really reducing trade deficits unless they become so prohibitive that they shut down essentially all trade. Tariffs can be a useful and strategic tool to hit targeted goals and provide effective protection to narrow industries, but they cannot work to increase manufacturing employment generally.”
“North Carolina lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs, including 60 percent of its furniture manufacturing jobs in the years following NAFTA.”
There is no dispute that North Carolina’s furniture manufacturing industry was devastated by Chinese imports when the United States lowered tariff barriers after China joined the World Trade Organization. The White House official provided an article published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
The article noted that furniture manufacturers led the way to production overseas, forming relationships with Asian companies to take advantage of low-wage labor to receive semifinished furniture. “The business of many North Carolina furniture companies gradually shifted away from manufacturing and toward importation and distribution,” the article said.
“And in Michigan, globalist policies destroyed 250,000 jobs, including 40 percent of the auto industry.”
The White House official supplied a Detroit Free Press article from 2018 — also rather out of date. Michigan has gained about 95,000 jobs since the article was published — and employment was higher under Biden than any period under Trump, according to BLS data. But manufacturing jobs have not entirely recovered from the pandemic.
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