CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris said she and President Biden have created 800,000 manufacturing jobs while President Donald Trump has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
“Donald Trump claims to have revived American manufacturing. The facts are that under Donald Trump, America lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. And more than 1,000 factories closed under his watch. But President Biden and I have created nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. We’re talking about a manufacturing boom,” Harris told a crowd of about 300 people in a high school gym in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday.
Verdict: Harris has made misleading statements about both President Trump’s record and the record of the Biden-Harris Administration.
In the two years since President Donald Trump took office, manufacturing jobs have grown by 462,000, with factories adding an average of 19,250 new workers each month. But by February 2020, manufacturing employment had shrunk slightly, adding just 414,000 jobs.
When the pandemic hit and many businesses closed, manufacturing employment, along with employment in most other sectors, fell sharply. Overall manufacturing employment fell by about 1.4 million jobs in March and April combined.
Harris’ claim that President Trump caused job losses is misleading because it places the former president at fault for the economic impact of the global pandemic. In fact, the U.S. economy weathered the pandemic much better than most other developed countries and has since recovered much faster and stronger.
Harris’ claim that she and Biden created 800,000 jobs is also misleading: U.S. manufacturing added about 742,000 employees between January 2021, when Biden took office, and October 2022, but most of those weren’t “new” manufacturing jobs as Harris claims; the factories were replacing jobs created under President Trump.
Moreover, just 20,000 new jobs have been added since October 2022, signaling a year and a half of stagnant manufacturing job growth. If anyone was expecting a manufacturing jobs boom in the early days of the Biden administration, that is long gone.
A more telling comparison of manufacturing employment just before the pandemic to current employment shows that under the Biden-Harris administration, manufacturing jobs have increased by just 170,000, averaging only about 4,000 a month.
