Rebuilding America’s industrial base carries a price tag roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of Italy. The McKinsey Global Institute pegs the cost at $2 trillion in capital expenditures, about 6% of US GDP, to replace the most strategically exposed manufactured imports with domestic production.
The report, released May 21, maps out which corners of America’s $3 trillion annual import bill are genuinely dangerous to rely on. The answer: about $760 billion worth, or roughly a quarter of total manufactured imports, which McKinsey labels “Achilles’ heels” due to their concentration in geopolitically risky supply chains.
The scale of the problem
On average, domestic production of these vulnerable goods would need to double. That’s the baseline. Some sectors are far more extreme.
Active pharmaceutical ingredients, the chemical building blocks of the drugs Americans depend on, would require more than five times current US output. AI servers, the hardware backbone of the artificial intelligence boom, would need a tenfold increase in domestic manufacturing capacity.
