WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration’s sweeping tariff regimen is starting to affect domestic steel production, with mixed results reported by lawmakers, steel manufacturers and industry analysts.
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Touring a Nucor steel plant in South Carolina late last week, Vice President JD Vance said President Donald Trump’s tariffs, particularly on imported steel, were ushering in a “golden age of manufacturing” and criticized those who disagreed.
“They attack us when we implement trade policies that do a very simple thing: rebalance trade in favor of American workers and American businesses, instead of foreign workers and foreign corporations,” Vance said in a speech at the plant.
Indeed, steel companies, including Nucor and Cleveland-Cliffs, have praised the 25% tariff on imported steel, saying the levies provide protection from unfair trade practices in China that flood the global market with below-market value steel.
Yet Cleveland-Cliffs announced last week it would indefinitely idle three steel plants this summer in Pennsylvania and Illinois, besides layoffs announced last month at a Michigan plant.
“We shouldn’t be seeing reduced demand after a steel tariff that’s encouraging companies to buy domestically,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at nonprofit Industrious Labs. “But because of other things happening in the market, that is what we’re seeing.”
Lewis said other tariffs, particularly on autos and auto imports, are cancelling out or even outweighing the benefits of steel tariffs. For example, tariffs on imported vehicle parts are raising the price of even domestically made vehicles, which often rely on imported parts. Higher prices then dent demand.
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“It’s hard to just say whether the steel tariffs good or bad because they don’t operate in a vacuum. But I think for the steel industry and for steel workers and communities in particular, you have to look at what the company is doing,” Lewis said. “Cleveland-Cliffs is closing facilities, so it doesn’t really seem like the tariffs are working.”
Cleveland Cliffs cited “weak automotive production” in March for its Dearborn, Michigan layoff—and specifically not Trump’s tariffs. The company said in a statement,
“We believe that, once President Trump’s policies take full effect and automotive production is re-shored, we should be able to resume steel production at Dearborn.”
At a press conference for the Heartland Caucus, consisting of Democrats from heartland states, lawmakers said their constituents could not wait for complete re-shoring of American industry to get their jobs back.
“[Trump’s] reckless imposition of tariffs in our part of the country, tariffs with no plan, no collaboration and no guard rails are not tools of renewal. They’re weapons of destruction,” said Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio.
The most effective strategy to boost manufacturing, Lewis said, is pairing tariffs with investments to modernize facilities.
For example, the Cleveland-Cliffs plant in Middletown, Ohio, Vance’s hometown, was set to receive a $500 million grant to upgrade its blast furnaces to run on hydrogen and natural gas instead of coal.
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