CJ Daily Newsletter Featured Politics and law

What Will Tariffs Mean for U.S. Competitiveness?

April 3, 2025

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Good morning,

Today, we’re looking at Trump’s tariffs, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s funding of radical activists on campuses, lawsuits against websites based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, New York City’s homeless shelters, and the Supreme Court’s “ghost guns” ruling.

Don’t forget to write to us at editors@city-journal.org with questions or comments.

Workers are seen on an assembly line for compactors at Volvo Construction Equipment plant on Thursday June 6, 2024 in Shippensburg, PA.

The Trump administration’s goal to reshore manufacturing has merit—the U.S. is overly reliant on foreign goods. But that doesn’t mean we need to make everything here at home, argues Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Allison Schrager.

“While Trump’s industrial policy may create some manufacturing jobs, the American economy’s shift away from domestic production was structural, the result of long-running changes in our labor force and technology that neither tariffs nor subsidies can reverse,” she writes. Indeed, some countries are just better at making certain goods, like iPhones, which is why so many jobs moved overseas.

Some reshoring can be justified, Schrager notes, but “a wholesale reshoring agenda could wind up making American industries less competitive and less efficient, while benefiting only the well-connected.”

Read her take here.

Radical university programs are thriving, thanks, in part, to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2020, it gave $15 million to the University of California system for its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which recruits tenure-track faculty committed to diversity. The same year, it gave the University of Virginia $5 million for its Race, Place, and Equity program. And in 2022, it gave Wayne State University $6 million to hire professors for a Black Studies Faculty Enhancement Initiative.

“University students, faculty, and administrators act like tenured activists in part because they’re recruited and funded to do just that,” writes John D. Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute. Read his detailed report on the foundation’s influence here.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to make physical spaces more accessible to the disabled. But as Internet access spread in the 1990s, lawyers began arguing that websites should also comply with the ADA and find ways to make it easier for the blind and deaf to use them. Judge Glock, the Manhattan Institute’s director of research, explains why this new focus is problematic.

“Lawyers attracted by the attorneys’ fees that the ADA offered began suing companies with websites based on vague standards of what constituted accessibility,” he writes. “The goal of disability laws should be to fix problems, not garner attorneys’ fees.”

New York City mayor Eric Adams might be onto something with his pilot program for homeless shelters, argues the Manhattan Institute’s Stephen Eide. Intended to create a culture of accountability, the effort will sanction adult clients who are unruly and/or unresponsive to housing offers. Read Eide’s take here.

In recent years, ghost guns—firearms assembled at home and completely untraceable—have increasingly contributed to crime in the U.S. Manhattan Institute Fellow Robert VerBruggen argues that the Supreme Court was right to uphold the Biden administration’s regulations on these devices. “As a matter of public policy, making untraceable firearms easily available without a background check is not a good idea,” he writes.

“The bad news is that Democrats approve of this across the cultural spectrum. Democrats I know who have kids, jobs and own a house express hatred, not just disapproval of Musk.”