LORDSTOWN, Ohio – 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 fall 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.
That announcement came a few weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans killed a $7,500 tax credit that was intended to jumpstart consumer demand for electric cars, sending U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 jeopardizing 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 United States 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 August 24 this year.
U.S. 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 fueling “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, U.S. 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 gasoline-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 startups like Rivian and China’s NIO were drawing investors and customers. One by one, automakers vowed to go big on electric cars and battery tech.
Unlike past U.S. 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 canceled, 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 canceled 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 canceled, and those where the EV portion of a wider investment couldn’t be isolated.
About four-fifths of the canceled investments were in red states, the Reuters analysis showed.
Some of those losses may be offset by a boost in auto-factory investments for gasoline vehicles since Trump returned to office. (The Atlas data don’t quantify jobs and investments that may result from converting canceled EV projects to traditional automotive factories.) In some cases, automakers are shifting foreign factory work to U.S. 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, U.S. 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 U.S. 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-center 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 utilizing 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 all have 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 signaled 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, signaled 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 U.S. 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 revitalize 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.