Reshoring After the Midterms: Which Product Families Still Have a Case Without Tariffs

In August, our Reshoring Readiness Index ranked aluminum semifinished products 5th of 57 families of industrial inputs on the strength of the case for making them in the United States. Take the tariff out of the score and the same family ranks 43rd.

That gap matters because policy turns over faster than factories do. An oil and gas executive put the problem plainly in the Dallas Fed's September energy survey: “Regulatory uncertainty poses a material risk to business investment. When administrations’ priorities shift sharply every two to four years, companies face a dilemma: Invest in initiatives the current administration favors or avoid them due to reversal risk under the next administration. This creates decision paralysis as executives defer capital deployment rather than risk stranded investments.”¹

The index weights the tariff at 45%, so a high duty carries a family a long way toward a high score. We re-ran it without the tariff to see which families still score well. The result is a screening list, not an investment verdict.

What the index measures, and what it leaves out

The index has three terms. The tariff term, weighted at 45%, blends the effective duty rate, counted up to a cap of 30%, with its change over the past year. The second, weighted at 30%, is each family's net import position: how far imports outrun exports, measured as 1 minus exports divided by imports. It is not the share of U.S. use that is imported, because it leaves out domestic production. The third, weighted at 25%, measures how concentrated the foreign suppliers are. The index's versioned methodology fixes these weights but does not give a statistical basis for them, so treat them as a design choice.

What the index does not measure is just as important: what it would cost to make the product here, including labor, skills, capital, permitting and returns, or whether customers would buy it. It points to where a closer look may pay off.

Built into the weights, and capped

With the tariff carrying the largest weight, heavily tariffed products rise toward the top almost automatically. As of August 2026, the six leading families are all metal, with effective duty rates from 33.8% to 50.4%, and in each the tariff is what Section 232 put there.

The cap matters as much as the weight. Because the index caps the duty-rate level component at 30%, all six sit above the point where more duty adds to that component. Their duties could fall by about 4 to 20 percentage points before the level part of the tariff term moved at all. A cut would register first in the trend part, which counts a year's change only within a band of 10 points up or down, so a cut that left the year's rise above 10 points would not move it either.

The ranking without the tariff

So we dropped the tariff term and rescaled the other two weights to add up to 100. That makes a different index. It asks which products the country imports heavily, net of exports, from concentrated suppliers, whatever the duty, and it does not model what would happen to costs or demand if duties fell. The exercise shows how the ranking changes when the tariff is left out, not how much of each score the tariff supplies. The net import position does most of the work, because supplier concentration is low in most families.

The exercise shows how the ranking changes when the tariff is left out, not how much of each score the tariff supplies.

Ranks can exaggerate change. The top 10 without the tariff sit within about 9 points of each other, so small differences move a family several places. The gap between a family's two scores is not the tariff's share of the first, either; the arithmetic is in the methods note. The large moves are still large: the six leading families lose 18 to 33 points. Fabricated structural steel holds near the top because U.S. exports in that family come to about $2 for every $100 of imports. Fabricated structural steel is the only family in the top six of both lists.

The reshoring cost comparison calculator sets landed import cost against domestic production cost, line by line, with the duty as one input among many. Cost a reshoring case with real numbers

What can still change

Neither remaining term is fixed. The net import position and supplier concentration move with prices, trade deals and policy too. A case that rests on them is less exposed to a single vote or proclamation, not immune to change.

A family near the top of the second list has a screening case that does not rest on the duty: the country imports far more of it than it exports, from relatively concentrated suppliers. That is a reason to look closer, with real numbers for costs, customers and capital. It is not evidence that a plant would pay off.

Further reading

• Reshoring Readiness Index, every family's score, terms and methodology.
• Dallas Fed Energy Survey, third quarter 2026, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Sept. 30, 2026.
• Fabricated structural steel and aluminum semifinished products, the two families named in the opening.