OPINION:
The numbers are in, and they tell a story that Washington’s globalist establishment does not want to admit.
America’s manufacturing revival under President Trump is real and accelerating. U.S. manufacturing added 5,000 jobs in July alone, capping seven consecutive months of growth and pushing the sector to its strongest expansion in over four years.
July’s factory output numbers hit their highest level in four years, a decisive signal that “Made in America” is making a comeback. Mr. Trump’s “America First” trade policies and Working Families Tax Cuts are doing exactly what he promised, bringing jobs and critical industry back home.
Companies are voting with their checkbooks. Novartis has pledged $23 billion across 10 U.S. manufacturing and research facilities. Chicago-based AbbVie announced a $1.4 billion pharmaceutical manufacturing campus in North Carolina. Roche committed $50 billion to American manufacturing. And Octapharma just announced a $1.5 billion investment to build its first-ever U.S. production facility, creating 1,500 jobs on American soil.
The White House has tallied more than trillions in new investment commitments since Mr. Trump’s return to office. The golden age of American manufacturing is here.
But we cannot declare victory and go home. The sobering truth is that our supply chain dependency on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is one of the gravest national security vulnerabilities we have ever faced and nowhere is that threat more dangerous than in our pharmaceutical sector.
Consider amoxicillin, the most prescribed antibiotic in the U.S., used by tens of millions of Americans every year to treat pneumonia, strep throat and other bacterial infections. There is exactly one manufacturer of it remaining in the U.S. and China controls 80% of the raw materials needed to produce it.
This is a chokehold that Beijing keeps by design.
The dependency runs deeper than amoxicillin. A landmark Johns Hopkins study found that U.S. antibiotic imports have increased roughly 26-fold since 1992, and that China now supplies American manufacturers with more than 60% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients needed to produce finished antibiotics.
The Council on Foreign Relations put it plainly: U.S. dependence on China for essential medicines “is structural, deeper, broader, and more consequential than conventional market analyses suggest.”
Beijing’s grip on U.S. pharmaceutical supply chains is no doubt a deliberate strategy to create dependency and leverage. As I have previously warned, we are not talking about a minor supply chain inconvenience here; we are talking about a strategic vulnerability that Beijing is actively exploiting.
China does not need to fire a missile to cripple American hospitals. In a conflict over Taiwan, or any flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific, all it needs to do is cut off our antibiotic supply.
Peter Navarro, writing in Defense News last month, framed it correctly: “America cannot dominate the modern battlefield if the Department of War does not know where its critical materials, components and software come from.”
The same logic applies to our hospitals.
Thankfully, Mr. Trump understands this. He signed an executive order that cuts red tape to accelerate domestic production of critical medicines.
Another order directed the creation of a Strategic Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients Reserve, a stockpile of the raw materials our manufacturers need most. In April, the administration invoked Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, formally declaring that pharmaceutical imports from adversarial nations threaten U.S. national security. The architecture of reshoring is being built.
The pharmaceutical commitments from Novartis, AbbVie, Roche, Octapharma and UCB are a strong start, but they are just that. Other manufacturers of antibiotics, generics and critical active pharmaceutical ingredients must increase domestic investment to protect our supply chain from foreign adversaries like China.
To do this, we must ensure that they have the incentives and regulatory runway to compete. We cannot allow market forces shaped by decades of Chinese subsidization to dictate where our lifesaving medicines are made.
Americans trust that when they walk into a pharmacy or a hospital, the drugs they need will be there. Right now, that trust rests on a supply chain running through Beijing.
President Trump’s manufacturing boom proves we have the political will and the economic momentum to change that. The only question is whether we finish the job before China decides to remind us of what dependency really costs.
• Chad Wolf is a senior adviser to the Protecting America Initiative and former acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Trump’s first term.
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