When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made a similar claim about lost factories later in March, the White House told the Washington Post that the figure came from a nearly 5-year-old analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
In that August 2020 report, which was about how Trump hadn’t been successful at reshoring manufacturing jobs during his first presidential term, the EPI said that “the U.S. has suffered a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants” between 1997 and 2018, the year that the U.S., Canada and Mexico agreed on a new trade deal, known as the USMCA, which officially replaced their NAFTA deal in 2020. The EPI report’s primary source was Business Dynamics Statistics data published by the Census Bureau.
But that figure appears to be out of date. When we tried to confirm that tally using the BDS online tool, we got a smaller decrease — a drop of about 65,000 establishments between 1997 and 2018. Census defines an establishment as “a single physical location at which business is conducted or services or industrial operations are performed.”
FactCheck.org
April 21, 2025
“This is a major and unprecedented action that risks the sensitive personal and location data of immigrant tax filers, which ICE could potentially use to target them for enforcement actions,” the Economic Policy Institute wrote in the days after the agreement was signed.
Raleigh News and Observer
April 21, 2025
Economist Monique Morrissey with the Economic Policy Institute calls the planned cuts a form of sabotage, and says Social Security is already very efficient.
“Less than 1% of what they are paying out goes to administrative costs. That’s including not just the staffing, but the office space and everything else,” she said. “So, almost all the money that’s going out of Social Security is going directly into beneficiaries’ pockets.”
Public News Service
April 21, 2025
“The 10% baseline tariffs are not as bad, but still will drag on growth on top of the other tariffs and other factors,” Adam Hersh, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive. “[The White House] only announced a 90 day pause. Maybe the tariffs will return, maybe not. But in the meantime it will leave a pall of uncertainty over investors and consumers.”
Restaurant Dive
April 21, 2025
In Maryland, lawmakers raised taxes by about $1.6 billion and cut spending by $2.3 billion to close a deficit that widened as the session progressed and federal layoffs shook the state economy. About 7% of Marylanders worked for the federal government in January, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Pluribus News
April 17, 2025
Making matters worse, the gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has been widening for nearly a half century, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with productivity growing nearly three times as much as hourly pay.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
April 17, 2025
“Bringing back a manufacturing job is far from a panacea for job quality in the US,” said Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a …[paywall].
Business Insider
April 17, 2025
According to a fall 2024 study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, there are 12.2% fewer school bus drivers…[paywall].
Tulsa World
April 16, 2025
…child labor protections-are analyzed in a 2023 report by the Economic Policy Institute, authored by Jennifer Sherer, Deputy Director of…[paywall].
Forbes
April 16, 2025