Trump's EV Rollbacks Stall US Auto-Factory Revival, Costing Jobs

The United States' push to build a domestic electric-vehicle and battery manufacturing base has stalled sharply since President Donald Trump returned to office, with a wave of cancelled projects putting tens of thousands of promised jobs at risk, according to an analysis of data from Atlas Public Policy, a nonpartisan research firm that tracks clean-energy investments.

Projects scrapped between January and August this year had pledged roughly 27,000 jobs, the data show. The figure is likely an undercount because some announcements did not include job estimates, and it excludes projects that were scaled back rather than cancelled outright. About four-fifths of the cancelled investment was in Republican-leaning states, and roughly 87% of all announced EV-related investment was in states Trump carried in 2024.

The fallout has been concentrated in a stretch of the country from Georgia to Indiana that drew so much EV-related spending it became known as the Battery Belt. In Lordstown, Ohio, a $2.3 billion battery plant owned by General Motors and South Korea's LG Energy Solution halted work in January, with its joint venture Ultium Cells indefinitely laying off about 480 employees and telling roughly 850 remaining workers they would not be needed for months. The plant had opened four years earlier amid the industry's biggest investment binge in generations.

Between 2019 and 2024, US auto-manufacturing investment more than doubled from the previous six-year period, with electric vehicles accounting for all of the growth, according to the Center for Automotive Research. The shift was driven by stricter fuel-economy rules and tens of billions in battery-production subsidies under former President Joe Biden, as well as market pressure from Tesla's soaring valuation and the rise of startups such as Rivian and China's NIO.

That momentum has reversed. Nearly $20 billion worth of projects were cancelled last year, while fresh investment announcements slowed to about $6.5 billion — just 29% of the prior year's total and a fraction of the $55 billion pledged at the 2023 peak. Ford CEO Jim Farley said watching EV sales fall after a $7,500 tax credit expired last September was "really the impetus for us to make the call" on a major writedown of EV investments.

White House spokesman Kush Desai did not directly address the effect of the administration's anti-EV policies on auto-manufacturing employment, instead faulting the Biden administration for fuelling "artificial demand" through subsidies. He said Trump was cutting regulation, renegotiating trade deals and reducing taxes to secure new manufacturing investment. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.

Since January 2025, US auto-manufacturing jobs have shrunk 1.3%, to about 963,000 in August, federal data show. Some losses may be offset by new investment in gasoline-vehicle factories, and automakers are shifting some foreign production to US plants with spare capacity to avoid tariffs. But so far, the administration's tariffs and retooling efforts have not produced a net gain in employment.

Analysts warn the pullback risks leaving the United States further behind China and Europe in electric-vehicle development. James Rubenstein, a professor emeritus of geography at Miami University of Ohio, described electrification as one of the biggest disruptors the industry has faced, and said the rollbacks "push it back." Automakers have offered some hope to laid-off battery workers, though for reasons unrelated to EV demand: growing appetite for energy-storage batteries.