Battle Motors added 200,000 square feet to its Ohio factory in 2022. It was part of a surge in manufacturing construction. Photo: Getty
INFOGRAPHIC
Can the Factory-Building Boom Continue?
Money has poured into manufacturing construction over the past four years. Will policy changes reverse the trend?
It has been an article of faith among certain commentators that hardly anything is manufactured in the United States anymore. There’s actually no truth in that assertion: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, which tracks all sorts of data aside from population, the value of shipments for all U.S. manufacturers exceeded $586 billion in 2024, a record.
What is true is that manufacturing output is a much smaller part of the overall economy that it has ever been. While manufacturing output has more than doubled since 1992, the gross domestic product, which includes services, agriculture, and more, has gone up by a factor of 4.6 over that time.
One limit on manufacturing has been an ongoing underinvestment in factories. But starting in 2021, however, factory construction shot up. Way up.
Boom Times?
Prior to 2009, manufacturing shipments would grow to new heights after each recession. (U.S. Census Bureau data underlying this and the other two charts goes back only to 1992 or 1993.) But the manufacturing sector struggled after the Great Recession that began after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and the COVID pandemic temporarily erased virtually all the gains of the previous decade. Manufacturing was a core preoccupation of the Biden Administration, and the value of manufacturing shipments grew more than 20 percent in his first year in office.
Or Continued Decline?
Even so, manufacturing flattened out after that initial burst. By Election Day in November 2024, the value of manufacturing output as a share of gross domestic product was barely higher than it had been during the deep COVID recession of 2020. Some of that was due to rapid growth in other parts of the economy, but considering how much importance President Biden had placed on manufacturing, it was a problem. (Manufacturing employment, which is not the subject of this article, barely surpassed the high point of the first Trump term and had begun to decline by Election Day.)
Factory Building
One area that did see a large and sustained response to the Biden Administration’s initiatives was private sector construction spending toward manufacturing—in short, building factories. Some of the Biden Administration’s key initiatives, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, supported the manufacture of high-tech and renewable-energy products in the U.S. Promoting domestically manufactured clean energy and high-tech products requires factories to build the products, and investment in factory building had been essentially flat for 30 years.
Boom … and Now Bust?
The factory-building boom over the past four years was remarkable, with manufacturing construction spending tripling from January 2001 to January 2025. That boom may not continue: The Trump Administration has indicated it wants to roll back Biden-era manufacturing support, and economic uncertainty during first months of 2025 may prompt manufacturers to rethink expansion efforts. Since products can’t be “Made in the U.S.A.” without factories in the United States, that might stymie efforts to make manufacturing a larger part of the U.S. economy.
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