MADISON, Wis. — In case you missed it, Wisconsin Public Radio reports that Wisconsin lost approximately 9,500 manufacturing jobs between January 2025 and January 2026, with experts citing the chaotic rollout of Trump’s tariffs made manufacturers reluctant to hire. Congressmen Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden have continued to back Trump’s tariff agenda at every turn, even as Wisconsin workers pay the price.

“Wisconsin is a manufacturing state, and nearly 10,000 jobs lost in a single year should be a wake-up call,” said Opportunity Wisconsin Program Director Meghan Roh. “Instead of pushing back on the chaos Trump’s tariffs have unleashed on Wisconsin workers and businesses, Congressmen Steil and Van Orden have gone right along with it. Wisconsin families need our members of Congress to put working families first and stand up to the Trump administration’s policies that are making it tougher for us to succeed.”

Wisconsin Public Radio: Wisconsin lost thousands of manufacturing jobs in 2025

  • Between January 2025 and January 2026, the state’s manufacturing workforce shrank by about 9,500 jobs, falling from 461,100 workers to 451,600, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The manufacturing workforce nationally declined by about 91,000 jobs over the same period.
     
  • Steve Deller, professor emeritus in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that the state is still heavily dependent on manufacturing, an industry that “tends to be more sensitive to downward trends in the economy.”
     
  • Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, described the industry as a bit of a “leaky boat” that’s been “slowly losing something.” While he said the economy is not in a recession, he called the wider economic environment “very unstable.”
     
  • Throughout 2025, he said manufacturers navigated a host of on-again, off-again tariffs. The Trump administration has framed tariffs as being aimed at bolstering domestic manufacturing.
     
  • While Paul said tariffs can benefit manufacturers, he said the rollout over the last year has been far too chaotic.
     
  • “It’s really like trying to run your company with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. People have opportunities and they want to grow their companies, but the uncertainty in the market and the inability to really have a clear, predictable path forward is making it difficult to hit the accelerator and let off on the brake.”
     
  • “Some of the leading economic indicators out there that do a really good job of forecasting what’s going to happen to the economy, zero-in on what’s happening to manufacturing. And for the Upper Midwest, some of those indicators are kind of looking down, so these employment numbers are not completely surprising.”