A new analysis from a conservative policy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence argues that President Donald Trump's sweeping April 2025 tariff rollout failed to deliver the manufacturing renaissance it promised, and instead wiped out tens of thousands of factory jobs while raising costs for American families and businesses.
The Advancing American Freedom Foundation report, first obtained by Fox News Digital, estimates that manufacturing shed roughly 75,000 positions during the tariffs' first year, about 6,250 jobs per month. Across the broader economy, the foundation's researchers calculated that up to one million fewer jobs materialized than would have been expected under pre-tariff trends.
The numbers deserve serious scrutiny, not reflexive dismissal. They come from a free-market institution on the right, not from a progressive think tank looking to score points. And the White House's response, a one-line swipe at Pence rather than a substantive rebuttal, did nothing to answer the underlying claims.
Richard Stern, vice president of the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise at Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital that the group reached its conclusions with high statistical confidence.
"We can say with an over 90% confidence level that manufacturing lost jobs because of the tariffs."
The report's broader analysis found a 99.9 percent probability that job growth slowed after the tariffs took effect. Employment weakened across most sectors, with manufacturing and trade-related industries among the hardest hit.
Stern explained the mechanism plainly. Many American manufacturers depend on imported components and equipment. Taxing those imports didn't punish foreign competitors, it raised the cost of doing business for domestic producers.
"Most of the Americans that are importing are American businesses, especially American manufacturers and producers. So the tariffs really ended up being a tax on high-end American manufacturing."
The foundation estimated that about 90 percent of the tariff burden fell on U.S. importers rather than foreign producers. The average American family paid roughly $1,000 more in tariff-related costs during 2025, the report stated.
That finding tracks with a recurring conservative concern about tariffs: they function as a consumption tax, and the bill lands on domestic buyers. When the inputs a factory needs get more expensive, the factory doesn't flourish. It contracts, or closes.
Whatever the tariffs failed to do for manufacturing, they succeeded at one thing: filling federal coffers. Treasury data cited in the report showed duties climbing from $9.6 billion in March 2025 to $23.9 billion by May. By the end of fiscal year 2025, tariff collections hit $215.2 billion, roughly triple pre-tariff levels.
The surge kept accelerating. In January alone, duties totaled $30.4 billion, up about 242 percent from $8.9 billion during the same month a year earlier. For the current fiscal year, tariff revenue had already reached approximately $230 billion, more than four times the amount collected during the same period last year.
Washington collected record sums. But the money came from American importers, and much of it filtered down to higher prices for consumers and manufacturers alike. Revenue is not the same as prosperity, and the foundation's report draws that distinction sharply.
The pattern is familiar in Washington: a policy generates impressive-sounding top-line numbers while the people it was supposed to help absorb the costs. The same dynamic has played out in other cases where administrations claimed credit for outcomes their own policies undermined.
The tariff debate didn't stay in the policy arena. Fox News Digital reported that the Supreme Court struck down sweeping tariffs, a ruling that handed Trump's signature economic agenda a significant legal setback. Businesses have since begun seeking billions of dollars in tariff refunds.
The report's authors framed the full arc bluntly, writing that the tariffs "unlawfully taxed American families, wiped out nearly a million jobs, and were ultimately ruled illegal."
That language is strong, and some of it is contested. But the legal dimension is real. When the nation's highest court invalidates a trade policy, the downstream consequences, refund claims, regulatory uncertainty, disrupted supply chains, compound the economic damage that was already underway.
Courts have increasingly shaped the boundaries of executive power in recent months. The same tension between presidential action and judicial review has surfaced in other high-profile legal confrontations involving the administration.
When Fox News Digital reached White House spokesman Kush Desai for comment, he did not address the report's claims. Instead, he took aim at the group's founder.
"Another useless memo is still not going to make Mike Pence relevant again."
That's a political jab, not an answer. The report contains specific job-loss estimates, Treasury revenue figures, probability calculations, and cost-per-household projections. A one-sentence dismissal referencing Pence's political standing does nothing to rebut any of it.
If the methodology is flawed, say so. If the job numbers are wrong, produce better ones. Calling the analysis "useless" without engaging a single data point is the kind of response that lets legitimate criticism fester unanswered.
Conservatives who care about accountability should expect better from any White House, including this one. The same principle applies when leaders on the left acknowledge their own failures; honest reckoning beats deflection every time.
Stern pointed to consequences that can't be reversed by policy adjustments or trade deals signed after the fact.
"You can't undo the damage. You can't undo a factory. There are many that closed in America because they couldn't get their hands on products used for manufacturing."
That's the hardest part of the story. Tariff revenue can be refunded. Trade deals can be renegotiated. But a factory that shut its doors because it couldn't source parts doesn't reopen overnight. The workers who lost those jobs don't get the lost months back. The communities built around those plants don't snap back to normal when the policy changes.
The promise behind the April 2025 tariffs, announced by Trump during a "Make America Wealthy Again" trade event in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, was that higher duties would spark a factory boom, bring jobs home, and reduce dependence on foreign goods. The Advancing American Freedom Foundation's analysis says the opposite happened.
The foundation, established by Pence in 2021, operates from a free-market, limited-government perspective. Its criticism doesn't come from the left's usual playbook of opposing any Trump initiative on principle. It comes from the right's own intellectual tradition, one that has long warned that tariffs are taxes, and taxes have consequences.
That tradition has produced serious internal debates within the conservative movement. The tension between protectionist populism and free-market orthodoxy is real, and this report lands squarely in the middle of it. Policy disagreements of this kind are distinct from the personal political feuds that dominate headlines, whether they involve failed legal maneuvers in Washington or executive decisions on national security.
None of this means tariffs are always wrong, or that every trade restriction destroys jobs. Targeted measures against genuinely predatory foreign practices can serve American interests. But broad, sweeping tariff hikes that raise costs on domestic manufacturers deserve the same rigorous cost-benefit analysis that conservatives rightly demand of every other government intervention.
The Advancing American Freedom Foundation put numbers on the table. The White House responded with a quip about Mike Pence. That imbalance tells its own story.
Conservatives don't have to agree with every finding in this report. But they should insist on an administration that answers data with data, not dismissals. The whole point of limited-government conservatism is that policies should be judged by results, not intentions. And when the results say 75,000 manufacturing workers lost their jobs in a single year, somebody owes them more than a punchline.
A policy that promises factory jobs and delivers factory closures isn't conservative. It's just expensive.
