How Trump's war on EVs derailed America's auto-factory revival
Between 2019 and 2024, US auto-manufacturing investments more than doubled from the prior six-year period, and EVs accounted for all of that growth, according to the Center for Automotive Research, which tracked announced projects.
Highlights:
- Trump's policies have disrupted America's EV manufacturing investment boom.
- Nearly $20 billion in EV projects were cancelled last year.
- Cancelled projects threatened approximately 27,000 promised manufacturing jobs.
- Most cancelled investments were located in Republican-leaning states.
- EV tax-credit repeal sharply weakened US consumer demand.
- Tariffs and immigration restrictions further complicated battery factory operations.
On a Friday afternoon in May, three men sat chatting on folding chairs inside Lordstown's local United Auto Workers hall. Normally, they'd be on their shift at the massive battery plant a few miles away. But they'd been out of work all year.
The factory – owned by General Motors and South Korea's LG Energy Solution – announced last autumn that work would stop in January because of slow electric-vehicle sales. Their joint venture, Ultium Cells, indefinitely let go about 480 employees, and told the remaining 850 factory workers they wouldn't be needed for many months.
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That announcement came a few weeks after US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans killed a $7,500 tax credit that was intended to jump-start consumer demand for electric cars, sending US EV sales tumbling. The layoffs were a sobering letdown after the burst of optimism when the factory opened four years ago, said Steve Baier, one of the workers passing time inside the union hall. "This plant is important to so many people," Baier said. "It's devastating."
The $2.3 billion, gleaming-white battery plant looms over an interstate an hour from Cleveland. It was built during the auto industry's biggest investment binge in generations. Between 2019 and 2024 – starting in Trump's first term and extending through the Biden administration – the US auto industry launched a massive wave of domestic manufacturing projects as it embraced an electric future.
The spending blitz promised an American auto-factory renaissance after decades of decline. The US needed its own EV-and-battery manufacturing base to break away from China, which was increasingly dominating EVs and their supply chains. Anti-China trade policies – launched during Trump's first term and continued under Joe Biden's presidency – and federal EV subsidies to buttress the market ensured that America's EV transition would require US plants and workers.
But since Trump returned to office, an array of automotive, environmental, trade and immigration policies has undermined factory projects and employment in Lordstown and across America's heartland. Cancellations of EV projects and related battery facilities have snowballed, killing or jeopardising tens of thousands of jobs, according to a Reuters analysis of data from Atlas Public Policy, a nonpartisan research firm that tracks clean-energy investments.
These policies are undercutting Trump's long-stated goal of creating auto-manufacturing jobs – core to his economic vision. And they are putting the US further behind China and Europe in developing electric vehicles, some analysts say.
The fallout is landing mostly on a swath of red states stretching from Georgia to Indiana, which drew so much EV-related investment it earned the nickname the Battery Belt. About 87% of the announced EV-related investments were in states Trump won in 2024, according to Reuters' analysis of the Atlas data, which tracked activity from 2015 through 24 August this year.
US EV investment had slowed even before Trump's policies froze the market. Americans weren't gravitating to electric cars in the numbers automakers had predicted, with some consumers turned off by high prices and range anxiety. But auto executives have cited Trump's policies in their decisions to scrap massive investments in EV and battery factories. Ford CEO Jim Farley said watching EV sales plummet after the tax credit expired last September "was really the impetus for us to make the call" on a massive writedown of EV investments.
In response to Reuters questions, White House spokesman Kush Desai didn't directly address the impact of Trump's anti-EV policies on auto-manufacturing employment, which has declined since Trump took office. He faulted the Biden administration for fuelling "artificial demand" for EVs with subsidies. Trump, he added, "is slashing red tape, renegotiating broken trade deals, and cutting taxes to secure trillions in new manufacturing investments – including billions from domestic and foreign automakers." Desai said the investments reflected announced commitments from companies and countries.
A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.
A boom reversed
Between 2019 and 2024, US auto-manufacturing investments more than doubled from the prior six-year period, and EVs accounted for all of that growth, according to the Center for Automotive Research, which tracked announced projects.
The electric shift was partly driven by carrot-and-stick measures implemented under Biden, including stricter fuel-economy rules for petrol-powered vehicles to cut carbon emissions and tens of billions in subsidies for battery production. But market forces also pressured automakers to act. Tesla's stock-market valuation was approaching $1 trillion and start-ups like Rivian and China's NIO were drawing investors and customers. One by one, automakers vowed to go big on electric cars and battery technology.
Unlike past US auto-factory booms, EV manufacturing promised a deeper industrial base and expanded supply chain, requiring a shift in the types of factories needed, said James Rubenstein, a professor emeritus of geography at Miami University of Ohio. It wasn't practical, for instance, to rehab an engine plant to make batteries. Entirely new capital investments were needed.
But last year, nearly $20 billion worth of projects were cancelled, the Atlas data show. Fresh-investment announcements slowed to around $6.5 billion last year – just 29% of the amount a year earlier and a fraction of the $55 billion the industry pledged at the peak, in 2023. "Electrification is about as big a disruptor as we've had," Rubenstein said. Trump's rollbacks, he said, "push it back".
The Atlas data show the projects cancelled between January 2025 and August this year had promised about 27,000 jobs. That's likely an undercount because some project announcements included in the data didn't have job-creation estimates. The tally also excludes projects that were scaled back rather than cancelled, and those where the EV portion of a wider investment couldn't be isolated.
About four-fifths of the cancelled investments were in red states, the Reuters analysis showed.
Some of those losses may be offset by a boost in auto-factory investments for petrol vehicles since Trump returned to office. (The Atlas data don't quantify jobs and investments that may result from converting cancelled EV projects to traditional automotive factories.) In some cases, automakers are shifting foreign factory work to US plants with spare capacity to avoid Trump's tariffs.
So far, though, the administration's tariffs and automakers' moves to retool idle factory space haven't produced a net job gain. Since January 2025, US auto-manufacturing jobs shrank 1.3%, to about 963,000 in August, federal data show.
The president and other Republicans have touted their anti-EV policies as a victory for consumer choice. Trump wanted to reverse rules that he said would force Americans to buy electric cars, or what he calls an "EV mandate". Under Biden, automakers would have needed roughly half of their sales to be EVs by the early 2030s, although there was no looming ban on combustion-engine cars. Trump has repeatedly called for expanding US oil-and-gas production.
Automakers have offered some hope to laid-off battery-plant workers for reasons that have nothing to do with EV demand or Trump's auto policy – there is burgeoning appetite for energy-storage batteries, driven by the boom in AI and data-centre construction. Ford, GM and their joint-venture partners, for example, have said they plan to convert some portion of their underused EV factories to produce storage.
Still, it can take months or years for automakers to switch plants equipped to make EV batteries to those for storage, which often requires a different chemistry. And demand for storage batteries isn't expected to come close to utilising dormant factory space intended for EVs.
Idled workers in 'Voltage Valley'
Lordstown residents are used to weathering the booms and busts of the car business. A GM assembly plant was one of the region's economic engines for more than 50 years, before it closed in 2019. The area is a well-worn campaign-trail stop: Trump, Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Mike Pence have all visited, offering recipes for reviving jobs and prosperity.
At a 2017 rally a short drive from Lordstown, a freshly elected Trump assured the crowd that manufacturing jobs were coming back: "Don't move. Don't sell your house." When GM about a year later signalled its plan to close its assembly plant, after a long period of declining employment, Trump publicly harangued CEO Mary Barra to save jobs in the area. That contributed to GM's decision to locate the battery plant here, three people with knowledge of the decision told Reuters.
In 2022, the GM-LG battery factory opened within a few minutes' drive of the shuttered vehicle facility. About 1,300 people went to work making battery cells for EVs. People started calling the area "Voltage Valley" instead of its historic Steel Valley nickname.
But by the summer of 2025, employees were spending their days doing busy work, like cleaning their workstations, rather than making battery cells, Baier said. When the layoff announcement landed in October, Ultium, the GM-LG joint venture, signalled a return-to-work timeline of six months. That was extended because of weak EV demand following the expiration of the tax credit.
Ultium in recent weeks brought back about 700 laid-off factory workers, and resumed battery cell production in mid-August. About 600 remain on indefinite layoff, the company said.
In statements to Reuters, GM and Ultium didn't directly address the impact of Trump's policies on their EV investment. GM said it is "continuing to advance EVs" and still sells a dozen EV models in the US. LG Energy Solution acknowledged a slowdown in EV demand following the expiration of subsidies but said it views electrification as a long-term prospect.
Many EV and battery projects sprang up in struggling places that Trump has vowed to revitalise through factory investment.
In tiny Glendale, Kentucky, two austere white structures jut up from surrounding farmlands. The battery plants were built early this decade by Ford and its former partner, South Korea's SK On, and operated by their joint venture, BlueOval SK.
For Rick Games, 72, the former head of the Elizabethtown-Hardin County Industrial Foundation, an economic development agency, the buildings reflect two decades of painstaking work promoting the site to dozens of prospective buyers, including Hyundai.
By 2020, automaker interest in this patch of farmland an hour south of Louisville – with its ample electricity and highway access – reached a fever pitch. "Good Lord, they were coming out of the woodwork," said Games.
In 2021, Ford and SK agreed to sink $5.8 billion into a site the size of 1,100 football fields. It was the largest single investment in Kentucky's history, and promised 5,000 new jobs. It also was part of Ford's biggest-ever manufacturing project, combined with a factory 300 miles away in Tennessee.
Officials in Glendale – population 2,000 – and the surrounding area raced to prepare for an expected influx of more than 20,000 new residents. Roads would be widened to accommodate construction trucks. Developers planned thousands of homes.
Ford and SK launched a hiring spree. Bill Wilmoth had recently moved back to the area. He started work at the Glendale battery plant in June 2024, making $21 an hour.
In mid-December 2025, Wilmoth and other workers were told to stay home, where he watched a management video sharing the news that about 1,500 of them were being laid off. "My heart dropped a little bit," he said.
In response to Reuters questions, Ford didn't detail the impact of the Trump administration's policy changes on its EV manufacturing. It said it plans to hire 2,100 workers at Glendale – less than half the originally estimated workforce – to produce energy-storage batteries, beginning in late 2027.
Ford said it's "prioritising affordability, choice and profits" by investing across gas-engine, hybrid and EV models. The company said it added 1,500 factory jobs in the year ending in July, and that it plans to launch a new electric pickup truck, the Fathom, at its plant in Louisville.
Representatives for SK On and the now-dissolved BlueOval SK declined to comment about the job losses at Glendale.
Tariffs, deportations throttle battery workforce
Killing the $7,500 tax credit is the policy change most cited by auto executives for derailing EV momentum. But that was only the most prominent in a flurry of pro-fossil-fuel Trump measures that have crippled the EV industry.
The administration also watered down tailpipe-emission regulations, and Congress froze fines that automakers have long paid for failing to meet federal fuel-efficiency requirements. The Trump administration and California have sparred in court over the state's right to set its own EV rules, in a battle that could determine the viability of the nation's largest EV market.
US trade and immigration policies also have worked against EVs. Steep tariffs hiked the cost of critical battery materials that are overwhelmingly produced in China, such as lithium-iron-phosphate batteries and graphite used in anodes.
Foreign battery makers also face tightened immigration enforcement that has hampered their ability to employ engineers at US factories. A September 2025 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on an under-construction battery factory in Georgia, co-owned by Hyundai Motor and LG Energy Solution, resulted in 475 people being arrested. Many of those sent home were engineers or specialists from South Korea needed for months-long stints to calibrate highly specialised machinery.
Some workers in South Korea now are reluctant to travel to the US, setting back operations by months at several of LG's US factories, two people told Reuters.
In a joint statement, LG Energy and Hyundai said the Georgia facility has been completed and shipped its first cells in July. Most of the plant's 500 workers were hired locally, they said.
Making 'muscle trucks' while China dominates EVs
For now, auto executives are liberated to aggressively pursue petrol-engine programmes.
On a sunny day in May, executives from Stellantis gathered journalists to a test track an hour west of Detroit to showcase a new line of Ram "muscle trucks", with engines as big as 6.4 litres. One truck, a yellow-and-black Ram 1500 Rumble Bee SRT, can zoom from zero to 60 miles per hour as fast as some Ferraris.
The trucks sped past Tim Kuniskis, head of Stellantis' American brands, as Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" rattled the bleachers and giant screens flashed "in loud we trust". Introducing several products with throaty V-8 engines "would have been impossible" without the government's policy changes, Kuniskis said.
Meanwhile, Stellantis has been scrapping EV projects as part of a $27 billion writedown. Part of its $6 billion, 2,800-job battery complex in Kokomo, Indiana, jointly planned with South Korea's Samsung SDI, is stalled. The automaker cancelled development on its planned Ram electric truck in late 2025.
Samsung SDI said it is in talks with Stellantis on the Indiana site's future.
Stellantis said the administration's revised regulations "are better aligned with market realities", and it's focused on delivering a range of vehicles and powertrains, from V-8 engines to pure EVs and small cars.
Ford, for its part, plans to switch production at its unopened Tennessee assembly plant from cancelled EV pickups to lucrative gas-powered ones, although work there will start several years later than initially planned as an EV factory.
As the midterm elections approach, it's an open question whether voters in affected states will punish Republicans for the EV retreat. In Glendale, many didn't fault Trump's policies for the empty battery plants.
Joshua Urso was among the workers let go in December. After applying for about 100 jobs, he found work first manufacturing steel shelving and racks for data centres, then at a fabrication shop. Still, he said the push for EVs under Biden was the real policy problem.
"Don't tell me I have to buy anything. I'll buy what I want to buy," he said. "If I want a gas-guzzling, black-smoke-churning diesel, I'm going to buy that."
Trump's pro-fossil-fuel agenda has put the US on a divergent path from the world's other top car markets, China and Europe. EV sales have surged in those regions because of buyer demand, fierce competition among carmakers and government support including tighter pollution rules and consumer incentives. This year, Europeans have gravitated to EVs as war in the Middle East pushed up petrol prices.
US automakers could see short-term gains from selling more gas-guzzling trucks, which are their biggest money-makers, instead of EVs. But that will ultimately put them further behind global rivals, said Susan Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University and senior adviser for industrial strategy under Biden.
"We're not going to be making the cars that the rest of the world wants, which are electric cars," Helper said.
Wilmoth, who was laid off from BlueOval SK, the Ford-SK venture in Kentucky, blames automakers for going too fast on EVs and the Biden administration for pushing stiff regulations. He is now working on an AI start-up.
He thinks often about how his colleagues lost careers they hoped would support their families for years.
"We existed for a while," he said, "pretending it was going to work."
