Steve Baier was supposed to be working at one of America’s biggest new battery manufacturing plants. Instead, on a Friday afternoon in May, he sat inside a local United Auto Workers hall with two other workers who had also been out of work for months.
“This plant is important to so many people,” Baier said. “It’s devastating.”
The scene in Lordstown captures a sharp reversal in America’s electric vehicle manufacturing push.
A $2.3 billion battery plant owned by General Motors and South Korea’s LG Energy Solution opened in 2022 with about 1,300 workers. But weak EV demand and policy changes since President Donald Trump’s return to office have disrupted operations.
Ultium Cells stopped production in January and indefinitely laid off about 480 workers. About 850 others were told they would not be needed for many months. The company resumed battery production in August and has brought back about 700 workers, while about 600 remained on indefinite layoff, it said.
EV Investment and US Manufacturing Jobs
The Lordstown factory was part of a much larger US auto industry investment boom.
Between 2019 and 2024, American auto-manufacturing investment more than doubled from the previous six-year period, according to the Center for Automotive Research. Electric vehicles accounted for all of that growth.
The strategy was designed to build a domestic **EV supply chain** and reduce America’s dependence on China for electric vehicles, batteries and critical materials.
But the boom has since slowed sharply.
Nearly $20 billion worth of projects were canceled last year, according to Atlas Public Policy data cited by Reuters. Fresh investment announcements fell to about $6.5 billion, only 29% of the amount announced a year earlier and far below the industry’s $55 billion peak in 2023.
Projects canceled between January 2025 and August 2026 had promised about 27,000 jobs, the Reuters analysis found. About four-fifths of the canceled investments were in Republican-leaning states.
Overall, 87% of announced EV-related investments were located in states Trump won in 2024.
Trump’s EV Policies and the Battery Belt
The expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit has become a major issue for automakers.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said the collapse in EV sales after the credit expired “was really the impetus for us to make the call” on a major writedown of EV investments.
The Trump administration has also weakened emissions rules, changed fuel-efficiency enforcement and imposed tariffs affecting battery materials. Immigration enforcement has created additional challenges for some foreign battery companies.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said the Biden administration had created “artificial demand” for EVs through subsidies. He said Trump was cutting regulations, renegotiating trade agreements and cutting taxes to support manufacturing investment.
Some automakers are now shifting toward gasoline vehicles.
Ford plans to use an unopened Tennessee plant for gasoline-powered vehicles instead of the canceled EV pickups originally planned there. Stellantis has also canceled EV projects while promoting new gasoline-powered trucks.
What Happens to America’s EV Factories?
Some unused EV facilities may be converted to make energy-storage batteries, as demand grows from artificial intelligence and data-center construction.
But automakers say those conversions can take months or years. Storage batteries can also require different chemistry, limiting how quickly factories can be repurposed.
The shift is already affecting communities that expected EV investment to create long-term employment.
In Glendale, Kentucky, Ford and SK committed $5.8 billion to battery manufacturing and promised 5,000 jobs. About 1,500 workers were later laid off.
Ford now plans to hire 2,100 workers at the site for energy-storage batteries beginning in late 2027 — less than half the original workforce target.
Meanwhile, U.S. auto-manufacturing employment fell 1.3% after January 2025 to about 963,000 workers in August, according to federal data.
For communities that built roads, homes and infrastructure around the expected factory boom, the numbers represent more than an industry shift.
They represent jobs that never arrived, jobs that disappeared and families waiting to see what comes next.
Read also: What went wrong? How Proterra’s collapse exposed the risks behind America’s EV boom
