Trillions Promised, Billions Spent: Where's the Onshoring?

The White House says $20 trillion is pouring into America. The government's own data says new foreign investment was $232 billion last year, and 94% of it went to buying companies that already exist.

If you listen to the President, America is in the middle of the biggest investment boom in history. He has said more than $20 trillion has come in during his second term and that it could hit $25 trillion before he's done.

That number doesn't show up anywhere in the government's own data. And the money that does show up is mostly not building anything new.

What the data actually says

Every year the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Commerce Department agency that tracks this, reports how much foreign companies spent to buy, start or expand businesses in the United States. Here's what it reported in June for 2025:

• Total new foreign direct investment: $232.2 billion. Billion, not trillion.
• $218.4 billion of that was acquisitions, meaning foreign companies buying U.S. companies that already exist. That's 94% of the total.
• $9.2 billion was expanding foreign-owned businesses already here. About 4%.
• $4.6 billion was starting new businesses from scratch. About 2%.

To be fair, $232 billion was up about 50% from 2024, which was a weak year. But UBS economist Arend Kapteyn pointed out that it's still about $30 billion below the ten-year average, and after inflation it's lower than any year before the pandemic.

So the "boom" is a normal year, and the money is overwhelmingly changing who owns existing companies, not building new factories.

Why buying a company isn't the same as building one

When a foreign company builds a new plant in Ohio, that's new construction jobs, new permanent jobs, new suppliers and new tax base. When a foreign company buys an existing American company, the factory was already there. The workers were already there. The only thing that changed is who gets the profits.

Sometimes an acquisition brings new money for upgrades. Often it brings "efficiencies," which usually means cuts. Either way, it isn't onshoring. Onshoring means bringing production that was overseas back to the United States, and you can't do that by buying something that was already here.

Here's what bothers me most about this. American companies are already not loyal to American workers. I wrote about that in my last post. Foreign owners won't be any more loyal. A company headquartered in Tokyo or Frankfurt answers to its shareholders back home, not to the town where the plant sits. When cuts come, the American workforce is the easiest line on the spreadsheet to trim. Japan and Germany were the two biggest foreign investors in the U.S. last year.

Put this next to what we already know. Hiring is barely moving. Somewhere between one in five and one in four job postings isn't a real job. And now most of the foreign money coming into the country is buying the companies that already employ Americans instead of building new ones. That's a real and serious problem, and nobody in Washington is talking about it honestly.

Where the trillions come from

So how does the White House get to trillions? By counting announcements and promises, not money spent.

• The White House's own website lists about $11.2 trillion in "major investment announcements," not $20 trillion. CNN asked the White House to back up the $20 trillion figure, and it couldn't.
• CBS News went through the White House list and found it includes pledges from foreign governments, trade goals that aren't investments at all, projects announced under the previous administration, and at least one company counted twice.
• Some of the biggest items, like $120 billion of Micron's chip investment, were announced back in 2022 with federal money behind them.

An announcement is a press release. A pledge is a promise. Neither is a building. Saudi Arabia's "$400 billion" commitment from 2017 ended up being less than a quarter of that over the next four years, according to CBS.

What this means for you

If you're making decisions about your job, your business or where to put your money, base them on what's actually being built, not what's being announced at a podium.

• If you're job hunting, a headline about a "$10 billion investment" in your state means nothing until there's a permit, a site and a hiring date.
• If you own a business that sells to manufacturers, don't staff up for a factory boom that isn't in the data yet.
• If you work for a company that just got bought, pay attention. New owners rarely leave everything the way it was.

Politicians from both parties inflate numbers. The fix is the same every time: look up the actual data. In this case it's one government report, and it's free.