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President Donald Trump has done what the old bipartisan consensus never dared: put trade and industrial policy squarely on the side of “Made in America.”
Tariffs are back, steering investment into domestic production.
Automakers, pharmaceutical firms and semiconductor giants are announcing new plants on American soil.
After three decades of offshoring, the signal from Washington is clear: Bring manufacturing home.
But there’s one thing no tariff or tax incentive can conjure out of thin air — a workforce.
Over the last few decades, the United States didn’t just lose factories; we let entire layers of process knowledge and shop-floor know-how wither.
Technicians and operators who once made our industrial base the envy of the world retired, moved on or were never trained.
If we’re serious about reindustrializing, we need a massive national effort to reskill and upskill American workers.
Our education system still worships a single brittle ideal: high school to four-year college to white-collar career.
Reality looks different.
Follow 100 kids entering ninth grade, and you’ll find that 13 of them won’t finish high school.
Another 29 will graduate but never enroll in college, and 27 more will enroll but never finish.
Of the 31 who do finish college, 13 of them will end up in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree.
That leaves just 18 out of 100 — the “fortunate fifth” — who make the smooth trip from high school through college to a job that actually needs the diploma they earned.
The United States once had robust career and technical education in high school, but today our schools are almost exclusively college-prep academies.
For the majority who will never get a bachelor’s degree, Washington offers a thicket of “workforce development” programs that sound good on paper but mostly fail.
A federal review found dozens of training programs across nearly a dozen agencies, costing tens of billions of dollars a year, with little evidence they raise earnings.
Participants often lose wages while sitting in classrooms — and then earn no more than similar workers who never went through the training at all.
In other words, we train people for jobs that don’t exist and pay for programs that don’t work, while the jobs we’re now creating go unfilled.
If Trump’s second-term trade and industrial strategy is to succeed, it needs an ambitious workforce strategy to match it.
That doesn’t mean another round of federal “jobs programs.” It means changing who we trust with taxpayers’ money.
The people best positioned to train workers for real, productive jobs are the ones who actually do the hiring: employers, often in partnership with unions and community colleges.
They know the equipment, the standards, and which skills matter when a new hire walks in the door.
But left to their own devices, firms under-invest in training the workers who need it most.
If a company spends its own funds to turn a high-school grad into a skilled tradesman, that worker can walk down the street to a competitor and cash in.
The payoff is uncertain, and the cost is real.
That’s where the American Workforce Act comes in.
Introduced last month by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, and based on a proposal developed by American Compass, the law would create a straightforward federal grant of up to $10,000 per worker placed in a high-quality, earn-while-you-learn training program.
To qualify, a worker must be a “trainee” whose time is split between paid work and structured technical instruction.
The training can be delivered by the employer, a group of firms, a union training center or a community college — but it must be tied to a real occupation in a real industry with a clear wage ladder, not just a credential of uncertain value.
In exchange for public funding, programs would have to publish their results, including completion rates, job placement in the relevant field, and wages before and after.
Funding wouldn’t come from new debt, but from reallocating resources: The law would trim subsidies and tax breaks for wealthy universities that gorge on public money, and redirect some of the federal cash spent on “training” into a much more effective model.
Trump’s tariffs and industrial policies have finally put Washington on the side of American production.
Now it’s time to put Washington on the side of American workers learning to produce.
Reindustrialization isn’t just steel and silicon. It’s workers who know how to make things.
Let’s stop pretending the college-for-all model and a failed federal bureaucracy will somehow produce an industrial workforce for the 21st century.
Instead, let’s start paying employers and their partners to train Americans, at scale, for the jobs we’re finally bringing home.
Daniel Kishi is a policy adviser at American Compass.