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One problem with Trump’s strategy: his mixed messages. He wants tariffs to spur a manufacturing renaissance but says he’ll drop the reciprocal duties if foreign countries lower theirs, Strain noted.

Still, some companies say they’re on board.

Hyundai last week announced plans for a $5.8 billion steel plant in Louisiana to supply its auto factories in Alabama and Georgia.

Honda said it will build its next-generation Civic hybrid in Indiana instead of Mexico to avoid tariffs on one of its top-selling models, Reuters reported.

And Apple said it would add 20,000 employees and produce AI servers in the U.S. as it seeks relief from Trump’s tariffs on goods imported from China, according to Bloomberg.

Companies including Volvo Cars, Volkswagen's Audi and Mercedes-Benz also have said they’ll move some production to the U.S. this year.

But some CEOs privately expressed reluctance to make long-term business decisions based on what could be a short-term policy.

“If (the tariffs) become permanent, then there’s a whole bunch of different things that you have to think about, in terms of where do you allocate plants, do you move plants, etc.,” General Motors Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson told investors last month.

“Those are questions that just don’t have an answer today. As much as the market is pricing in a big impact of tariffs and lost profitability, think about a world where we’re spending billions in capital, and then it ends. We can’t be whipsawing the business back and forth.”

At least some automakers will produce more cars in the U.S. and buy American steel and aluminum to dodge tariffs, said Panos Kouvelis, professor of supply chain, operations and technology at Washington University in St. Louis. Some, he said, have additional capacity and electric vehicle supply chains that are still being formed, whichmakes them easier to reshuffle.

Yet most will probably drag their feet and see how the tariffs evolve as long as possible, said Robert Lawrence, a professor international trade and investment and Harvard’s Kennedy School of public policy and government.

Other industries are also taking a cautious approach.

EVCO, a Wisconsin-based maker of plastic parts for other companies, has been hit with hefty tariffs on its molding for boats, all-terrain vehicles and other power sports materials it produces in China, said Anna Bartz, company vice president of communications.

But it would be difficult for EVCO to switch production to the U.S. even after figuring in the tariffs, which it partly passes along to customers. American labor costs are significantly higher than those in China, Bartz said. And it would cost $12 million to $15 million and take a year to build a new U.S. plant, plus another year before some of its factory equipment is certified, she said.

“It’s naïve to think that it’s that easy – that we can put things anywhere,” Bartz said.

By contrast, EVCO makes medical devices in the U.S. because doing so pays dividends, said Richard Duval, EVCO’s vice president of U.S. operations Their production demands greater precision and merits the wage premium earned by high-skilled American workers, he said.

More companies are weighing bringing production to the U.S., Canada or Mexico than to the U.S. specifically, said Dave Evans, CEO of Fictiv, a supply chain consulting firm.

What is the main purpose of tariffs?

Broadly speaking, Trump is seeking to restore a U.S. manufacturing heyday that hasn’t existed for decades. In the 1950s, factory jobs made up nearly a third of the nation’s workforce. But offshoring to countries with lower factory wages began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s and gained steam in the 2000s after China joined the World Trade Organization.

Today, the nation’s 12.8 million manufacturing jobs make up just 8.4% of U.S. payrolls and are down from 17.3 million in 2000, Labor Department figures show.

But that doesn’t mean America doesn’t make things anymore.

From 1979 to 2018, even as the industry shed a third of its payrolls, manufacturing production more than doubled, JPMorgan Chase said in a report.

Of the 5.6 million manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost from 2000 to 2010, 4.5 million were wiped out by improved productivity, including automation, while just 1.1 million fell victim to offshoring, according to a study by Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana.

The U.S. still has a strong manufacturing base for products that rely on high-skilled labor and automation such as advanced machinery, medical devices and engine components, said Neil Bradley, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“We’re always going to elect to sell things to people in other countries and buy things from them,” Bradley said.

Some American companies have brought production back to the U.S. to benefit from faster deliveries, higher-quality production and plentiful energy resources, such as natural gas. During his first term, Trump sought to turbocharge the movement, imposing tariffs on Chinese imports, solar panels and washing machines, and steel and aluminum.

Steelmakers had struggled for years because of a global overcapacity that led to massive import surges, especially from China, that undercut American steel prices.

Hicks argued that as a result of the 25% steel tariff imposed during Trump's first term, U.S. producers “simply boosted their price to become more profitable” rather than shift production from overseas.

But Kevin Dempsey, CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute, said the tariff helped revive the industry before the levy was watered down by exceptions and loopholes. U.S. steelmakers announced plans to invest $15.7 billion in new or upgraded steel facilities, creating at least 3,200 jobs, according to a 2021 study by the Economic Policy Institute.

Some studies are skeptical. Though the tariffs created 1,000 jobs for steelmakers protected by tariffs, they reduced employment by 75,000 in steel-using industries such as autos and construction as prices rose and sales fell, according to a study by Harvard University and the University of California, Davis.

Dempsey disputed the figures, saying that steel comprises just a small portion of a vehicle and that the price increases amounted to a few hundred dollars for a $30,000 car.

In all industries affected by Trump’s tariffs, the duties boosted factory employment 0.4% by protecting certain sectors from imports but reduced payrolls 2% by harming the many more fields socked by rising costs, a Federal Reserve study concluded. And that doesn’t include the harm to U.S. exports from retaliatory tariffs by foreign countries.

The remedy?

Make the tariffs so sweeping that they prod both the makers of parts and finished goods to shift manufacturing to the U.S., said Harry Moser, head of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit that advocates bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.. Until then, manufacturers that make more solar panels or cars in America, for example, will be stuck paying Trump’s tariffs for Chinese solar materials or Mexican auto parts.

But shifting entire product ecosystems from one country to another is a tough proposition.

Companies that spend as much as billions of dollars to move production from China or Mexico to the U.S. “have to ask how long (the tariff) is going to last,” Kouvelis said.

Another challenge: Manufacturers must be willing to make big investments in an uncertain environment in which tariffs have increased recession risks and weakened customer demand, Kouvelis said.

'It's so volatile'

Prevelo Bikes, which makes premium children’s bikes, mostly in Cambodia, doesn’t face additional tariffs for now. But company CEO Jacob Rheuban is worried.

“It’s so volatile I feel like I could wake up any day and there’ll be a 50% tariff on everything,” Rheuban said.

In that case, Rheuban said, he couldn’t spend several hundred thousand dollars to build an assembly plant in the U.S. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

If he did, he also would want to move production of parts such as tires, brakes and cranks to the U.S. so any glitches can be fixed in hours instead of days or weeks. Those goods are made by Asian suppliers.

“There’s just no way," he said. "I don’t have the resources.”

Still another challenge for manufacturers mulling a move to the U.S. is a historically low 4% unemployment rate that limits the pool of skilled workers, the chamber’s Bradley said. The problem, he said, is intensified by baby boomers' retirements.

Furniture reshoring not 'sustainable'

If the furniture industry brought more assembly back to the U.S., the wood, glass, hinges and other parts would still be made in Asia, said Shannon Williams, CEO of the Home Furnishings Association.

And if it tried to reshore manufacturing full-scale, it would be scrambling for workers, she said. The 4% jobless rate means that if 30% of all unemployed people could work in manufacturing, that would supply 2 million employees for furniture and other industries, compared with hundreds of millions of workers in Asia, Williams said.

Asian factory workers earn an average $13,000 a year, compared with $43,000 for U.S. employees, Williams said. Bearing those labor costs would make the traditional furniture industry uncompetitive with online discounters such as Wayfair that ship modular pieces for consumers to assemble, Williams said.

“The industry couldn’t bring (production) back and have it be sustainable,” she said.

In a best-case scenario, if tariffs spurred so much new production in the U.S. that it wiped out the entire $1.2 trillion U.S. trade gap, Lawrence estimates it would create about 1.5 million manufacturing jobs. That’s 1% of all U.S. jobs and a blip in a labor market that sees 5 million workers quit or lose jobs every month, Lawrence and Strain said.

By contrast, if tariffs set off a recession, it likely would mean 3.5 million fewer jobs by 2027, according to Moody’s Analytics.

Contributing: Reuters

This story has been updated with new information.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump tariffs unlikely to restore US manufacturing glory, experts say