For thirty years after the Cold War, American companies built their businesses on one bet. The world would stay peaceful and open, so the smart move was to make everything wherever it was cheapest. Mostly that meant China. Factories moved across the Pacific, the suppliers followed the factories, the skills to run them followed the suppliers, and prices on store shelves fell.
Between 2020 and 2025, that bet fell apart. A pandemic emptied shelves and stopped car plants for want of two-dollar chips. A ship stuck in the Suez Canal held up billions of dollars in trade a day. Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe’s energy prices exploded. The United States and China started cutting each other off from chips and rare earths, and Ford shut a plant for three weeks for lack of magnets. The price spikes that followed are still in your grocery bill.
Companies stopped asking where things are cheapest and started asking where they can count on them.
So the factories are coming home, and they’re running into a problem nobody budgeted for.
You can move a house. People jack it up off the foundation, load it onto a flatbed, and haul it across the county. What you can’t move is the neighborhood. The house arrives on its new lot without the grocery store, the school, the hardware store or the plumber who knows the pipes. A factory works the same way. The building comes back in two or three years. The suppliers, raw materials, engineers and test labs behind it took decades to leave, and nobody photographs them at the ribbon cutting.
I think reshoring is absolutely the right thing to do, and I’ve been glued to it, watching something I hoped for start to come true. I spent thirty-three years in enterprise IT and lived through smaller versions of the same problem, and I haven’t seen American business move this hard in the right direction in a long time.
Why is the old global trade order breaking down?
For about thirty years after the Cold War ended, American business ran on a simple bet. The world was at peace, more or less. Trade made countries richer and friendlier. China, once it got rich enough, would become a normal partner. The smart move for any company was to buy everything from whoever made it cheapest, wherever on earth that happened to be.
That bet built the modern economy. It also assumed the ships would always sail, the borders would always stay open, and no government would ever use a factory as a weapon.
Every one of those assumptions has failed in the last six years.
The pandemic came first, and it showed that a country can’t borrow masks from a neighbor who needs them too. Then Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Europe had built much of its industry on cheap Russian gas, and it watched energy prices explode. Germany learned in a matter of months what it means to depend on a rival for something you can’t do without.
The United States and China moved from partners to rivals. In 2022, Washington restricted sales of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China. China answered with export limits on gallium and germanium, two metals used in chips, and in 2025 on rare earths and the magnets made from them. Each side discovered that the other controlled something it needed, and both started squeezing.
Shipping lanes stopped being safe. From late 2023, attacks on ships in the Red Sea pushed much of the traffic between Asia and Europe around the southern tip of Africa, adding a week or more to the trip. The question of Taiwan, home to most of the world’s advanced chip production, went from a diplomat’s worry to a boardroom one.
None of this belongs to one party or one president. The shift has run across administrations in Washington and across governments in Europe and Asia. Economists describe it as a move from efficiency to resilience. Companies and countries are now willing to pay more to make sure they can get what they need when things go wrong, because things keep going wrong.
Reshoring is what that shift looks like on the ground in Ohio, Arizona and Texas.
The book on this: Stuck in the Middle is the long version of this argument. It ties civic decline, military overreach and the competition between great powers into one story about where the next thirty years are headed.
What is reshoring in manufacturing?
Reshoring means bringing manufacturing that moved overseas back to the United States. A company that has been making its products in China decides to make them in Ohio or Texas instead.
It travels with a few cousins. Foreign direct investment is a company from another country building its plant here, the way Japanese and German automakers built in the American South decades ago, and the way Taiwanese and Korean chipmakers are building now. Nearshoring means moving production closer to home without bringing it all the way home, usually to Mexico. Friend-shoring means moving it to countries considered reliable partners.
All four have the same root cause. Companies decided that having their production on the far side of the Pacific, concentrated in one or two countries, had become too risky. The question is why they decided that, and what it takes to undo forty years of the opposite decision.
How did American manufacturing end up overseas?
One spreadsheet at a time.
Starting in the 1980s and picking up speed through the 1990s, American companies learned they could cut costs by having products made in places with cheaper labor and lighter regulation. Electronics went first, then textiles, furniture, toys, tools and almost everything else that could be shipped in a container. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 turned a steady drift into a flood.
The numbers from that period are stark. US manufacturing employment fell from 17.2 million workers in 1999 to 11.4 million in 2011. Economists at MIT and elsewhere estimated that competition from Chinese imports cost between two and two and a half million American jobs over that stretch, counting the suppliers and service businesses that went down with the factories.
Every one of those decisions made sense on paper. A product that cost forty dollars to build in Indiana cost twelve to build in Guangdong. Shareholders liked the margin. Customers liked the price. The quarterly numbers looked wonderful.
The executives who signed off collected their bonuses and retired. The towns that lost the plants are still paying for it.
It makes me angry, looking back. Consultants sold offshoring as strategy, Wall Street rewarded every plant closing with a bump in the share price, and politicians of both parties cheered it on as progress. Did anybody in those boardrooms ask what would happen if the ships stopped? Did anybody ask who would know how to make anything here in twenty years? A few people did, and they were waved off as dinosaurs who didn’t understand the global economy.
They understood it fine. They just weren’t the ones getting paid to dismantle it.
What the spreadsheets didn’t capture was what moved along with the assembly line. When the factory left, the parts suppliers followed, because suppliers cluster around the plants they serve. The tool and die shops followed. The engineers who knew the processes moved into other careers or retired, and nobody replaced them. The training programs that fed those jobs shrank, because there were no jobs to feed. Over twenty years, America exported more than factories. It exported the knowledge of how to run them.
Apple’s chief executive explained it in 2017, when an interviewer asked why the company built its products in China. Tim Cook said the draw was skill, and he was blunt about it. “In the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room,” he said. “In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”
That’s the neighborhood, described by a man who chose where to build his house.
You can move the factory. You can’t move the neighborhood around it. – Richard LoweShare on X
Why is America reshoring now?
The collapse of the old bet explains the mood. Six specific shocks explain the timing. Between 2020 and 2025, the system that looked so efficient on a spreadsheet broke in public, over and over, in ways nobody could ignore.
There isn’t one reason. There are about six, and they arrived close enough together that they reinforced each other.
The pandemic showed how thin the chain was
In early 2020, American hospitals ran short of masks, gowns and gloves. Most of them were made overseas, and the countries making them needed them too. A country that had led the world in manufacturing couldn’t produce enough paper masks to protect its own nurses.
Then came the chip shortage. Carmakers cut chip orders when the pandemic hit, expecting sales to collapse. Sales came back faster than expected, and by then the chip factories had sold their capacity to electronics companies. A car can need more than a thousand chips, and missing a two-dollar part stops the whole vehicle. AlixPartners estimated the shortage cost the auto industry $210 billion in revenue in 2021, with about 7.7 million vehicles never built. Dealer lots sat empty and used car prices went through the roof.
One stuck ship blocked a canal
In March 2021, a container ship called the Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal and blocked it for six days. Estimates at the time put the trade held up at about $9.6 billion a day. One ship, one gust of wind, one narrow channel, and hundreds of vessels sat waiting at either end.
The backlog took months to clear.
Nobody thought the Suez Canal was a secret. Everybody knew it was there. What surprised people was how little slack the system had once something went wrong. Lean supply chains run on the assumption that everything arrives on time, and the canal showed what happens when it doesn’t.
Shipping costs went crazy
Moving a forty-foot container across the ocean cost about $1,420 in 2019, according to Drewry’s World Container Index. By September 2021, it cost $10,377. Rates came back down by 2023, but every company that had built its business on cheap, predictable shipping learned the hard way that the shipping could stop being cheap or predictable almost overnight.
I don’t think anybody who paid those rates has forgotten them.
China stopped being cheap
The offshoring math depended on low wages, and Chinese wages didn’t stay low. By one widely cited estimate, Chinese manufacturing wages roughly tripled between 2005 and 2016, reaching about $3.60 an hour, while Mexican wages stayed near $2.10. That gap helped push production to Mexico, Vietnam and India. In 2023, Mexico passed China as the largest source of goods imported into the United States for the first time in more than twenty years, about $475 billion against $427 billion.
The cheap labor that started all this had stopped being cheap.
Automation narrowed the gap further. Robots now do much of the assembly in modern plants. Labor becomes a smaller share of a product’s cost. Being close to customers starts to count for more than the lowest wage on earth.
Too much depends on too few places
The pandemic made people look at maps, and some of what they saw was alarming. One company in Taiwan, TSMC, makes the overwhelming majority of the world’s most advanced chips, commonly estimated at around 90 percent. Every smartphone, data center and modern weapons system depends on chips made on one island a hundred miles off the Chinese coast.
Raw materials told the same story. The International Energy Agency reports that China refines more than 95 percent of the world’s rare earths and battery-grade graphite, and around 70 percent of lithium chemicals. In April 2025, China suspended exports of certain rare earths and the magnets made from them. Within weeks, Ford shut down its Chicago Assembly Plant for three weeks because it couldn’t get the magnets that go into seat motors, wiper motors, door motors and speakers. A truck doesn’t need much of those metals. It needs them all the same.
Government money and trade policy
Washington put real money behind bringing production home. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 set aside $52.7 billion for semiconductors, including $39 billion to build and expand chip plants, plus a 25 percent tax credit for chipmaking equipment. Other laws added incentives for batteries, solar and electric vehicles. Tariffs on Chinese goods, first imposed in 2018, have been kept and extended across administrations of both parties.
People argue about those policies constantly. Either way, they changed what it costs to build here. A plant that looked marginal in Arizona looks very different with a few billion dollars in grants and a tariff on the alternative.
Put those six forces together and you get a decade where companies stopped asking only “where is it cheapest?” and started asking “where can I count on it?”
Did the supply chain breakdown cause today’s inflation?
I think it’s the root cause, and the evidence backs that up better than most people realize.
Inflation in the United States ran about 1.7 percent in February 2021. By June 2022 it hit about 9 percent, the highest in forty years. Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard, two of the best-known economists in the field, studied what drove it. Their finding was that the first wave came mostly from supply shocks: energy prices, food prices, and price spikes on goods that ran short, like cars. Car production alone fell from about 11.7 million vehicles a year to under 9 million.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco put a number on the supply chain piece. It estimated that supply chain pressures accounted for about 60 percent of the surge in US inflation from early 2021 into 2023. Shortages raised what companies paid for parts and materials, and they convinced customers that prices would keep climbing. The expectation fed the climb.
Other forces piled on. Pandemic spending pushed demand up while supply was falling, and once the commodity shocks eased, a tight labor market kept wages and prices rising. Economists still argue about the mix. What none of them argue about is that the chain broke first, and the prices followed.
Inflation has come down a long way since the peak. Prices haven’t. The groceries, the car, the rent and the insurance all reset at a higher level and stayed there. Forty years of betting everything on the cheapest supplier on the far side of the world cost the people who never got a vote in the decision, and it’s still costing them.
Reshoring is partly an answer to that. A country that makes more of what it needs at home is harder to knock over with one shortage. It won’t make everything cheaper, and some things will cost more, but it should make the next price shock smaller.
How much manufacturing is coming back?
More than at any time in living memory, though less than the headlines suggest.
The Reshoring Initiative has tracked announcements since 2010. It counted about 245,000 reshoring and foreign investment job announcements in 2024, up from around 11,000 a year in 2010. Roughly a million were announced over four years. Computer and electronic products made up 35 percent of the 2024 total, and electrical equipment and components another 31 percent. Those are the industries with the most complicated neighborhoods of all.
Construction tells the same story. Spending on new manufacturing facilities in the US ran about $76 billion a year at the start of 2021. By September 2024, it hit about $250 billion a year, more than triple. Chip plants, battery plants and electronics factories went up across Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
The boom has cooled since. Census figures put manufacturing construction at about $171 billion a year by August 2026, still more than double the 2021 level but well off the peak. Some projects slowed, some were delayed, and some were canceled when incentives changed or demand shifted. That’s normal for a cycle like this. The direction hasn’t reversed.
Some of the bets are paying off. TSMC’s first Arizona plant ran into trouble early, with delays blamed on a shortage of workers experienced with its equipment. It started producing 4-nanometer chips anyway, and the company reported that its early yields in Phoenix were a few points higher than comparable plants in Taiwan. American workers learned the tools. It just took longer than anybody planned.
I find that encouraging. It’s an amazing sight, watching this much of the country’s industrial base come home after I spent most of my adult life watching it leave.
Which industries are reshoring the most?
The biggest wave is in the industries that scared people most when the supply chain broke.
Semiconductors lead the list. TSMC, Samsung, Intel and Micron all announced major American plants after 2022, and chip factories are among the most expensive buildings on earth. They’ve also had the most visible trouble. Intel pushed its Ohio plant back to the end of the decade, and nearly every chip project has fought over workers, equipment and schedules.
Batteries and electric vehicles come next, with plants spread across Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan and the Carolinas. Some of those projects have slowed as demand for electric cars cooled. Reshoring follows markets as much as policy.
Electronics and electrical equipment make up the largest share of announcements, about two thirds of the 2024 total between them. That covers everything from transformers and power equipment for the grid to the circuit boards and devices that go into everyday products. These are exactly the products that need radio testing and certification before they can be sold. The testing gap hits them first.
Medical supplies and pharmaceuticals drew attention after the mask shortage, and some production of protective equipment and generic drug ingredients has moved back. The scale there is smaller so far. Most of the active ingredients in American medicine are still made in China and India.
The pattern across all of them is the same. The product that failed us in a crisis is the product companies are bringing home first.
Does nearshoring to Mexico count as reshoring?
Not strictly, but it matters to the same story.
A lot of the production leaving China hasn’t come to the United States. It has gone to Mexico, where wages are lower than American wages and the factories are a truck ride from Texas instead of a month at sea. The trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada makes that move easier, and plenty of companies have taken it.
For American industry, that’s a better outcome than leaving everything in Asia. Plants in Mexico tend to buy far more of their parts and materials from American suppliers than plants in China do, because the supply chains on both sides of the border have been tied together for decades. A car can cross the border several times as parts before the car is finished. A Mexican factory keeps more American suppliers busy, and it can’t be cut off by one ship stuck in a canal.
That’s a real gain, even if the factory isn’t in Ohio.
Mexico has its own neighborhood problems, too. It needs engineers, test capacity, power and water just like any American town with a new plant. Some of the same shortages show up on both sides of the border, and in some fields the two countries are competing for the same small pool of skilled people.
Why is the factory the easy part of reshoring?
Because a factory is a building, and America knows how to put up buildings. Money, land and a construction crew will get you a plant in two or three years. Everything that feeds the plant is harder.
A single circuit board shows the problem. The board itself needs copper, glass fiber and resin. Then come chips from a fab, passive components by the million, connectors, solder, a stencil shop, a pick-and-place line, an inspection station, and a test fixture somebody had to design. Most of those pieces were made within a short truck ride of each other in southern China. Bring the final assembly to Ohio and every one of those pieces is suddenly an ocean away.
None of that shows up in the groundbreaking photo.
Apple found this out the hard way, years before anyone was talking about reshoring. Apple built its 2013 Mac Pro in Austin, Texas. It was meant to show off American manufacturing. The design needed a custom screw. In China, a factory would have cranked out millions of them on short notice. In Texas, the job landed at a small machine shop in Lockhart that could make about a thousand a day. The owner sometimes delivered them himself. Production stalled, and Apple ended up ordering screws from China.
A screw. The most ordinary part in the building, and there was nobody nearby who could make enough of them.
That story is a decade old, and some of it has improved since. The lesson hasn’t changed. A product is the last link in a chain of a thousand smaller products, each of which needs its own supplier, its own tooling and its own people who know how to make it. Move the last link and the rest of the chain is still on the other side of the world.
I made this point in a LinkedIn thread this week, and the founder of a wireless testing lab answered with the line I keep coming back to. The factory may be the easy part, he said. Behind every factory sits a web of suppliers, engineers, test facilities, certification bodies and specialists, and much of it took decades to move offshore. Nobody can switch it back on.
He’s right, and the piece he knows best is the one hardly anybody talks about.
Who tests and certifies electronics made in America?
Every phone, router, smart speaker, baby monitor, car key fob and wireless gadget sold in the United States has to be tested before it can go on the shelf. The tests check that the device’s radio emissions stay within limits, so your new earbuds don’t interfere with an aircraft radio or somebody’s pacemaker.
The system works in layers. A testing lab runs the measurements in a shielded chamber with specialized equipment. The lab has to be accredited, meaning an outside body has audited its procedures, equipment and staff against an international standard. A certification body then reviews the results and grants the authorization. The Federal Communications Commission recognizes the labs and the certification bodies, and without that recognition, the paperwork is worthless.
Each layer needs people, equipment and time.
Of the 591 labs the FCC recognizes, 126 are in mainland China or Hong Kong, and 50 of those are in Shenzhen alone. The FCC estimates that about 75 percent of US-bound electronics are tested in China. That made sense when the products were built there. You tested the device near the factory that made it, the same way you’d want the inspector close to the job site.
Now that’s changing too. In 2025, the FCC began barring labs owned or controlled by companies on its national security list from testing devices for the US market. In 2026, it voted to advance a proposal that would stop every lab in China and Hong Kong from certifying devices for American sale. The reasons are debated. The effect on capacity is simple arithmetic. A large share of the world’s testing is about to need a new home, at the same moment more electronics are being built here.
A lab can’t be thrown up in a season. Shielded chambers and expensive measurement equipment come first. Accreditation comes next. It takes audits, documented procedures and time. Most of all, a lab needs engineers who understand radio regulations that grow more complicated every year, across Wi-Fi, cellular, Bluetooth and every new band that gets opened up.
Radio testing is only one layer. Products also need electrical safety testing, so they don’t catch fire or shock anyone. Medical devices need their own testing before the FDA will clear them. Cars and their parts go through crash, emissions and electronics testing. Aircraft parts, industrial equipment and children’s products each have their own labs and their own rules. Most of that testing capacity followed the factories overseas the same way radio testing did, and every reshored product has to pass through some combination of it before it ships.
Prices show how scarce that capacity is. Reports put basic testing in China at roughly $400 to $1,300, against $3,000 to $4,000 in the United States.
Big companies can absorb that. They’ll build their own labs or sign long contracts with the few independent labs that have room. Who gets squeezed? The small manufacturer with one new product and a launch date, who discovers that the queue for a test chamber is months long and the price is triple what it used to be. A great many reshored products will come from exactly those companies.
The founder I mentioned said demand for US testing is climbing, including from Chinese manufacturers who now need American certification for products they sell here. His lab spent years investing in automation and cloud systems so each engineer can test more. The whole country needs that kind of investment, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it’s missing.
That drives me a little crazy. The country is spending billions on factories and almost nothing on the labs that decide whether their products can be sold.
Made in America is turning into made, tested and certified in America. The testing part of that sentence is where the bottleneck sits.
Where will the raw materials for reshored factories come from?
Raw materials are the slowest piece of the neighborhood to rebuild. They start in the ground.
A factory that builds electric motors needs magnets. Magnets need rare earths. Rare earths have to be mined, separated and refined, and refining is where China has spent thirty years building a near monopoly. The United States has rare earth deposits and one significant operating mine. What it has lacked is the processing capacity to turn ore into usable metal, so American ore has often been shipped to China to be refined.
Mines and refineries take years to permit and years more to build. A new chip plant takes about three years. A new mine can take ten or more from discovery to production. The raw material layer of reshoring will trail the factories by a long way, and for that whole stretch, an American plant can still be shut down by an export decision made in Beijing. Ford’s three-week shutdown in 2025 was a preview.
Magnets are small. Their absence isn’t.
I find it hard to believe a country this size let its refining capacity drift away and called it efficiency.
The same pattern shows up in steel grades, specialty chemicals, pharmaceutical ingredients, and the high-purity gases chip plants consume by the truckload. Some of it will come from the United States. Some will come from Canada, Australia, Mexico and other partners. Very little of it is ready today.
My LinkedIn comment said it’s one thing to move a factory from China to Iowa. Raw materials were the first thing I had in mind. A factory in Iowa running on materials from China hasn’t moved as far as the ribbon cutting suggests.
Where will the workers for reshored factories come from?
That’s the hardest question in the whole effort, and the numbers are sobering.
Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute estimate that US manufacturing could need 3.8 million new workers by 2033. Up to 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled. Retirements are a big part of it. So are skill gaps in technical roles and an education pipeline that hasn’t kept up. The fastest growing roles are the high-tech ones, like semiconductor processing technicians.
Semiconductors show the problem in miniature. The Semiconductor Industry Association and Oxford Economics projected about 115,000 new chip industry jobs by 2030, with 67,000 of them at risk of going unfilled. TSMC’s Arizona delay came down to the same thing: not enough people who had worked on that equipment.
Remember Tim Cook’s tooling engineers. The skills that matter most here aren’t the ones a person can pick up in a two-week orientation. A tool and die maker takes years to train. So does an experienced process engineer, a quality engineer, an equipment technician, or the RF test engineer who knows why a device failed the chamber and what to change. America let a generation of those careers wither, and the people who had those skills are now retiring.
Companies stopped training people because it was cheaper to buy the skill overseas. That was a lousy trade, and the bill is arriving now.
That’s the neighborhood showing up late, the way it always does after a house move.
The fix is unglamorous and slow. Community colleges and trade programs tied to the plants near them. Apprenticeships. Companies paying to train people they could once hire ready-made from overseas, and keeping them long enough for the training to pay off. Test labs and factories investing in automation so each skilled person can do more. None of it makes headlines, and all of it decides whether the factories run.
Can automation solve the reshoring labor shortage?
Partly. It’s the best tool available, and it isn’t a substitute for people.
Modern plants run far more automation than the factories that left in the 1990s. Robots weld, paint, place components and move parts around the floor. A plant that once needed a thousand workers may need three hundred. That’s a big part of why reshoring makes financial sense at all, because the labor cost advantage overseas shrinks when the robots do most of the work.
Robots create their own staffing problem, though. Somebody has to program them, maintain them, fix them when they break at two in the morning, and figure out why the line’s output dropped four percent last Tuesday. Those are skilled jobs, and they’re the same jobs the country stopped training people for. A fully automated plant with nobody who can repair the automation is a very expensive building with the lights off.
AI will help too, and I’ve written plenty about where it does and doesn’t. The pattern I keep seeing holds in factories as much as offices. Augmented beats replaced. The plants that win will be the ones where skilled people use automation and AI to do far more than they could alone. They still need the skilled people.
Test labs are a good example. Automation lets one engineer run more tests, faster, with fewer mistakes. It doesn’t tell the engineer why a device failed or how the client should fix it. That judgment comes from years of experience, and you can’t download it.
A skill you send away doesn’t come back on its own
I learned this lesson at the scale of one IT department, long before anyone was talking about reshoring.
When I ran computer operations, I built a private cloud that replaced about three hundred old machines with eight hosts. I was proud of that project and I still am. My team wanted to learn the new technology, but they were already running everything else and had no hours to spare. So I hired a firm to operate it. That worked well, and it worked permanently. My team never got the skill back, because a skill your people never acquire doesn’t show up later by itself.
The country made that same decision ten thousand times over, one plant and one supplier at a time. Every single choice made sense on a spreadsheet. Nobody chose the final outcome. It crept in while everybody was busy doing their jobs well.
I hit the other side of it, too. When I needed database administrators, nobody in the United States applied. Not weak applicants. None. A skill that isn’t practiced locally stops being taught locally, and then it stops existing locally. Rewriting the job posting does nothing for an empty market.
A reshoring company hits the same wall when it posts for tool and die makers or RF test engineers in a town that hasn’t needed them in twenty years. The problem isn’t the pay or the posting. The people don’t exist yet, and they won’t until somebody trains them.
What will reshoring mean for prices and products?
Some things will cost more, at least for a while. American labor, American testing and American compliance cost more than their Chinese equivalents, and some of that lands on the price tag. Anyone who tells you reshoring is free isn’t being straight with you.
Other things get better. Products made closer to the customer arrive faster and can change faster. A company that designs and builds in the same region can fix a problem in weeks instead of waiting on a container. Quality problems get caught by people who can walk down the hall to the line. And when the next pandemic, canal blockage or export ban hits, a product made here keeps shipping.
That last point is the one I’d weigh most heavily. The cheapest product in the world is worth nothing if you can’t get it.
How long will reshoring take?
My estimate is five to ten more years before the suppliers, labs, raw materials and workers catch up with the buildings. It took forty years to send it all away, so a decade to bring the core of it back would be fast.
I’d pay that price ten times over. A country that can make, test and certify its own products doesn’t have to hope a supply line on the other side of the world stays open. I’ve written about what happens when one hidden link in a chain gets compromised, in the pager attack and other supply chain attacks. Every link you can see and inspect yourself is one less you have to trust blind.
There will be setbacks. Some plants will be delayed. Some will close before they open. Some incentives will change, and some companies will discover their neighborhood problem after they’ve already poured the foundation. None of that changes the direction.
When it’s done, America will be in a much better place. Getting there means paying attention to the parts nobody photographs.
What should business leaders do about reshoring?
If you’re bringing production home, plan for the neighborhood before you pour the foundation.
Start with testing and certification. Find out where your products will be tested, how long the queue is, and what it will cost, and book that capacity early, because it’s getting scarcer. If your products need FCC authorization, talk to accredited US labs now, before a deadline forces everybody else to call them at once.
Map your suppliers two and three layers down. You may know who makes your circuit boards. Do you know where their copper laminate comes from, or the magnets in the motor, or the specialty chemical in the coating? Each one is a place your line can stop.
Ask where your technicians will come from in five years, and start training them now. Partner with the community college down the road. Build an apprenticeship program. Pay people enough to stay once they’re trained.
And decide which skills you’ll keep in your own building. The ones you hand away tend to stay away.
I’ve spent a lot of time on what decades of hollowing out did to American business in The Enshittification of America, and why I wrote it. Reshoring is the first big move in the other direction I’ve seen in a long time. The rest of the series is collected in the Enemies of You hub.
If you lead a company that’s part of this rebuild, you’re living through a story most people will only read about later. A business book is a good way to tell it while it’s fresh.
The house is on the new lot. Now comes the neighborhood.
