The Verge has revisited a conversation with Evan Smith, cofounder and CEO of supply chain software company Altana, to take stock of what Trump's tariff waves have actually delivered in terms of domestic manufacturing — and the answer, by the account presented there, is not much.
To understand why that conclusion carries weight, it helps to understand what tariffs were supposed to do. The theory behind aggressive import duties, as articulated by the administration and its allies, was essentially a pressure campaign: make it expensive enough to manufacture abroad, and companies will eventually conclude that building factories on American soil makes more economic sense. It is a logic with some historical precedent, particularly in industries where labor costs are a smaller share of total production expense and where proximity to consumers genuinely matters. The problem is that modern supply chains were not built with a single variable in mind.
Altana occupies an interesting vantage point on this question. The company builds software that maps and manages global supply chain networks — the tangled webs of suppliers, subcontractors, logistics providers, and raw material sources that sit behind almost every product a consumer touches. That kind of visibility is exactly what corporations scrambled for when the pandemic exposed how fragile their sourcing assumptions were, and it became even more valuable as the geopolitical environment grew more complicated. When Smith talks about what tariffs are and are not doing to those networks, he is drawing on data from the actual decisions companies are making in real time, not from economic projections.
What that data appears to show is a pattern that trade economists have been predicting for years: tariffs redirect supply chains more often than they reshore them. When the cost of importing from one country rises sharply, the path of least resistance for most companies is not to build an American factory — a process that takes years, requires skilled labor pipelines that do not exist overnight, and demands capital expenditure that boards are reluctant to approve under conditions of policy uncertainty. The more common response is to find a cheaper or tariff-exempt source somewhere else. This is why Vietnam, Mexico, and other countries saw manufacturing investment surge during earlier rounds of US-China trade friction. The work moves; it does not necessarily come home.
This matters beyond the policy scorecard. The communities and workers who were promised a manufacturing renaissance are the ones most directly affected by the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. If supply chains are simply rerouting through third countries rather than terminating in Ohio or Michigan, then the employment dividend that was supposed to justify the economic disruption of higher consumer prices never arrives. Meanwhile, the higher prices do. That is a distributional outcome worth stating plainly.
There is also a competitiveness dimension that tends to get less attention than the jobs narrative. American manufacturers who depend on imported components — and a great many do, because truly self-contained domestic supply chains barely exist at scale in most industries — face input cost increases that their foreign competitors may not. A tariff on steel helps domestic steel producers but raises costs for domestic automakers and appliance manufacturers. The net effect on American industrial capacity is, at minimum, ambiguous, and in some sectors likely negative.
The likely reading of Smith's return to The Verge is that the conversation has moved from anticipation to assessment. In early 2025, the question was how companies were preparing to respond. Now there is enough elapsed time to see what they actually did. The this-suggests-itself interpretation is that most large multinationals chose adaptation over transformation — tweaking their networks to manage tariff exposure without committing to the kind of fixed domestic investment that would be politically legible as a win.
For policymakers, that creates a dilemma. Doubling down on tariffs in hopes that the pressure eventually becomes large enough to force genuine reshoring is one option, but the threshold at which that becomes true may be higher than any politically sustainable rate could achieve, and the collateral damage in the meantime is real. Pulling back risks looking like capitulation. The middle path — targeted industrial policy, subsidies, workforce development — is slower and less dramatic but has more evidence behind it, which is perhaps why legislation like the CHIPS Act attracted unusual bipartisan support when it passed.
The things worth watching in the coming months are the investment decisions of major manufacturers in capital-intensive sectors, any formal revision to tariff schedules, and whether trade data shows continued diversification toward third-country intermediaries — what analysts sometimes call tariff laundering. If the rerouting pattern solidifies, the political pressure to reframe the entire trade strategy will grow. And companies like Altana, which sit at the intersection of policy and logistics reality, will likely be among the first places reporters look to take the temperature of a global trading system that has yet to settle into its new shape.
