Job-Killing Cuts – Trump Administration Claws Back Funding, Stunting Growth

USW members at the Libbey Glass plant in Toledo, Ohio, celebrated last year when President Joe Biden’s administration awarded the company up to $45.1 million from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to build a pair of hybrid electric furnaces.

No longer, the workers believed, would they have to jury-rig aging, outdated equipment to maintain production at the century-old plant, a linchpin of Toledo’s economy.

The innovative new furnaces – designed to reduce emissions, increase efficiency and usher in a new era of glassmaking – promised long-term stability for their plant and a giant leap forward for American manufacturing.

Workers quickly undertook the first steps in the complex construction project. And then in May, Donald Trump stabbed them all in the back.

Trump summarily canceled $3.7 billion in IRA grants, including the one at Libbey, killing jobs and bringing a manufacturing resurgence to a screeching halt. Dozens of projects advancing the future of cement, glass, steel and other industries—many of them involving USW members—all fell by the wayside.

“It’s been total disbelief,” said Tom Bixler, president of Local 65T, one of three USW bargaining units representing about 620 workers at the Toledo plant. “It’s been a shock to our system.”

Trump began threatening the IRA even before taking office in January, and workers approached Libbey with their concerns.

“We were told straight up that the grant was already granted, already approved by the U.S. government, and will not be taken away,” Bixler said of Libbey’s response, noting workers at that point had begun relocating the power room to make space for the new furnaces.

But as Trump and his Department of Energy began reneging on IRA commitments in the spring, Libbey confirmed that it would lose its grant after all.

Bixler said the company ultimately pledged to continue operating the Toledo plant—but intended to do so using the old, existing equipment.

Without federal support, he said, Libbey scrapped plans for the new, state-of-the-art furnaces. Off the table as well were dozens of additional jobs that would have accompanied the upgrades, Bixler said, adding that the disappointment in Trump rippled through the community.

The USW and other unions helped to push the IRA through Congress three years ago without a single Republican vote.

By fall 2024, the law had helped to create 150,000 jobs. In all, it was projected to create 13.7 million jobs while growing the economy by $1.9 trillion, according to an independent study commissioned by the American Clean Power Association, an industry group.

The Department of Energy carefully selected grant recipients based on their potential to build manufacturing capacity, enhance America’s global competitiveness and support family-sustaining jobs.

The opportunity proved so historic that the USW and Heidelberg Materials in Mitchell, Ind., worked together to secure up to $500 million for a modernization of the nation’s second-biggest cement plant.

Federal and state officials joined union and company representatives last year at a ceremony to announce the investments, which were among the largest allocated under the IRA. Heidelberg Materials went on to perform significant engineering and site-preparation work for the project, only to have Trump pull the plug.

“It was a big deal,” Local 7-00030 President Doug Duncan said of the project, which would have supported 1,000 temporary construction jobs and generated dozens of permanent positions.

“It would have been good for the local economy,” continued Duncan, who represents about 115 USW members at the plant. “It would have been a whole new facility that would have been built. I’m not so sure what’s going to happen now.”

Trump likes to talk about building manufacturing capacity and making more goods in America.

But that’s just bluster. His rollback of the IRA showed his true feelings—contempt for manufacturing communities and disdain for working people.

“This isn’t ‘cute’ to me,” said USW Local 2140 president Ron Woods, who likened Trump’s blithe abandonment of the IRA to the sick amusement that Trump and his crackpot sidekick, Elon Musk, derived from wielding their chainsaw against the federal work force and agencies serving ordinary Americans.

Woods works at U.S. Pipe in Bessemer, Ala., which last year was awarded up to $75.5 million in IRA funds to install new electric-induction melting furnaces.

As planned, the project had the potential to boost manufacturing capacity and sustainability, securing the future of a plant that’s decades old and an anchor of the local economy.

In addition, the plans called for creating dozens of high-paying jobs as well as opportunities for current workers to advance. It’s the kind of boost sorely needed in Bessemer, where nearly one-third of the residents live in poverty.

But Trump yanked the grant and pulled the rug out from under the people there.

“This administration is screwing over the United States,” Woods said.