Trump’s Goal of Reshoring Comes Up Short After a Year of Tariffs
A new Kearney report shows reviving US factory output could be a long slog
US supply chains are reconfiguring and relying less on China — they’re just not sparking a renaissance in domestic factory production quite yet.
In its annual Reshoring Index set to be released just after 9 a.m. New York time on Wednesday, Chicago-based management consultancy Kearney said the gauge remained in negative territory in 2025 despite a surge of Trump administration tariffs aimed at reviving American assembly lines.
The index is derived from a manufacturing import ratio — measuring the total goods imports from 14 Asian countries as a percentage of domestic output — which rose to 14.15 last year from 13.29. The latest Reshoring Index is the basis-point difference of minus 86, which was an improvement from minus 115 in 2024. (A negative number signals net offshoring.)
Kearney said that while data in its report “clearly shows tariffs have reshaped some sourcing patterns,” they “didn’t seem to drive significant near-term increases in reshoring or reduce America’s total import dependence.”
Patrick Van den Bossche, a Kearney partner in strategic operations and a co-author of the report, said the findings offer a nuanced reading of the effect of President Donald Trump’s import taxes on reshoring.
He said some products such as apparel and computers and electronics “are going to be impossible to reshore in a meaningful way because the capabilities and ecosystems required for those products are just not available in the US and the landed cost to make these outside of the US still remains lower, even with sustained tariffs.”
Five-Year Horizon
Van den Bossche added that “other types of products could continue to inch further towards more reshoring, especially for the downstream fabrication and assembly portions.”
The difficulty, he said, is that manufacturing capacity even for those products amenable to reshoring can’t be developed in a year or two, and they require a degree of certainty about which tariffs will be imposed over the longer term.
“For those products to move back in a material way, this will require further investments in new capacity and automation,” he wrote in response to questions from Bloomberg. “These kinds and sizes of investments are typically made with a 5+ year horizon in mind and even with ‘stable’ tariffs under 301 being put in place by this administration, there’s no guarantee that those will stay in place under the next administration.”
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