Programs designed to attract remote workers to America’s heartland have outlasted their pandemic-era origins. City officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are among those hoping to reverse the economic impact associated with decades of brain drain. A program called Tulsa Remote has helped achieve that goal, reportedly luring over 3,600 people to Tulsa since 2018. Thanks to funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Tulsa Remote pays workers $10,000 to relocate for a minimum of one year. Newer programs with less funding, meanwhile, have seen limited success.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer met privately in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump to make a case he did not want to hear: the automotive industry, he said, he wants to save, was being hurt by his tariffs.
The Democrat came with a slide deck to make her points in a visual presentation. Just getting the meeting on Tuesday with the Republican president was an achievement for someone viewed as a contender for her party’s White House nomination in 2028.
Whitmer’s strategy for dealing with Trump highlights the conundrum for her and other Democratic leaders as they try to protect the interests of their states while voicing their opposition to his agenda. It’s a dynamic that Whitmer has navigated much differently from many other Democratic governors.
The fact that Whitmer had “an opening to make direct appeals” in private to Trump was unique in this political moment, said Matt Grossman, a Michigan State University politics professor.
It was her third meeting with Trump at the White House since he took office in January. This one, however, was far less public than the time in April when Whitmer was unwittingly part of an impromptu news conference that embarrassed her so much she covered her face with a folder.
On Tuesday, she told the president that the economic damage from the tariffs could be severe in Michigan, a state that helped deliver him the White House in 2024. Whitmer also brought up federal support for recovery efforts after an ice storm and sought to delay changes to Medicaid.
Trump offered no specific commitments, according to people familiar with the private conversation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke only on condition of anonymity to describe it.
Whitmer is hardly the only one sounding the warning of the potentially damaging consequences, including factory job losses, lower profits, and coming price increases, of the import taxes that Trump has said will be the economic salvation for American manufacturing.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said no other president “has taken a greater interest in restoring American auto industry dominance than President Trump.” Trade frameworks negotiated by the administration would open up the Japanese, Korean, and European markets for vehicles made on assembly lines in Michigan, Desai said.
But the outreach Trump has preferred tends to be splashy presentations by tech CEOs. In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave the president a customized glass plaque with a gold base as Cook promised $600 billion in investments. Trump claims to have brought in $17 trillion in investment commitments, although none of those numbers have surfaced yet in economic data.
Under his series of executive orders and trade frameworks, U.S. automakers face import taxes of 50% on steel and aluminum, 30% on parts from China, and a top rate of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico not covered under an existing 2020 trade agreement. That puts America’s automakers and parts suppliers at a disadvantage against German, Japanese, and South Korean vehicles that only face a 15% import tax negotiated by Trump last month.
On top of that, Trump this past week threatened a 100% tariff on computer chips, which are an integral part of cars and trucks, though he would exclude companies that produce chips domestically from the tax.
Whitmer’s two earlier meetings with Trump resulted in gains for Michigan. But the tariffs represent a significantly broader request of a president who has imposed them even more aggressively in the face of criticism.
Materials in the presentation brought by Whitmer to the meeting and obtained by The Associated Press noted how trade with Canada and Mexico has driven $23.2 billion in investment to Michigan since 2020.
General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis operate 50 factories across the state, while more than 4,000 facilities support the auto parts supply chain. Altogether, the sector supports nearly 600,000 manufacturing jobs, forming the backbone of Michigan’s economy.
Whitmer outlined the main points of the materials to Trump and left copies with his team.
To Grossman, the Michigan State professor, a key question is whether voters who expected to be helped by tariffs would react if Trump’s import taxes failed to deliver the promised economic growth.
“Everyone’s aware that Michigan is a critical swing state and the auto industry has outsized influence, not just directly, but symbolically,” Grossman said.
AP VoteCast found that Trump won Michigan in 2024 largely because two-thirds of its voters described the economic conditions as being poor or “not so good.” Roughly 70% of the voters in the state who felt negatively about the economy backed the Republican. The state was essentially split over whether tariffs were a positive, with Trump getting 76% of those voters who viewed them favorably.
The heads of General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis have repeatedly warned the administration that the tariffs would cut company profits and undermine their global competitiveness. Their efforts have resulted in little more than a temporary, monthlong pause intended to give companies time to adjust. The reprieve did little to blunt the financial fallout.
In the second quarter alone, Ford reported $800 million in tariff-related costs, while GM said the import taxes cost it $1.1 billion. Those expenses could make it harder to reinvest in new domestic factories, a goal Trump has championed.
“We expect tariffs to be a net headwind of about $2 billion this year, and we’ll continue to monitor the developments closely and engage with policymakers to ensure U.S. autoworkers and customers are not disadvantaged by policy change,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said on his company’s earnings call.
Since Trump returned to the White House, Michigan has lost 7,500 manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Smaller suppliers have felt the strain, too.
Detroit Axle, a family-run auto parts distributor, has been one of the more vocal companies in Michigan about the impact of the tariffs. The company initially announced it might have to shut down a warehouse and lay off more than 100 workers, but later said it would be able to keep the facility open, at least for now.
“Right now it’s a market of who is able to survive, it’s not a matter of who can thrive,” said Mike Musheinesh, owner of Detroit Axle.
Wall Street economists disagree on what’s behind a sharp slowdown in US job growth, highlighting a divide that is central to the broader outlook for the economy.
Some argue the pullback in hiring mostly reflects a smaller supply of workers, thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. Others say the slowdown is largely due to a more concerning retrenchment in demand.
The distinction is critical. If difficulty finding workers is the main factor, weak hiring trends probably aren’t foreshadowing wider layoffs, and the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates high. But if hiring is mostly slowing because of waning demand for labor, that would call for the central bank to intervene.
“Whether what we’re seeing is all immigration effects or if it’s true demand effects is definitely the key question,” said Veronica Clark, an economist at Citigroup Inc. “There very likely are some immigration effects in the data, but details also suggest weaker demand unrelated to immigration, which seems to be getting worse.”
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, published on Aug. 1, shocked financial markets with weak hiring figures for July and steep downward revisions to the prior two months. It was such a surprise that Trump fired the head of BLS, accusing the agency, without evidence, of rigging the numbers to make him look bad.
Those adjustments brought the pace of payroll growth down to just 35,000 on average over the last three months, the slowest since 2020. While the unemployment rate edged up to 4.2% in July, matching the highest level since 2021, it’s still not much different than where it’s been over the past year.
Analysts spent an unusual amount of time over the following week continuing to dissect the report. The Trump administration’s dramatic changes in trade and immigration policy this year have made the job of reading the labor market much more challenging, just as those shifts have raised the stakes for continued economic expansion.
Read More: Autopsy of a Black Swan — July’s Payroll Revisions
The key question hinges on the impact of reduced immigration. Two days before the release of the report, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told reporters the Fed would discount a slowdown in hiring in the months ahead as long as the unemployment rate doesn’t rise.
The Fed chief even suggested the so-called breakeven rate — the number of jobs the US economy needs to add each month to keep the unemployment rate stable — could be as low as zero, given what’s happening with immigration.
Powell’s interpretation, and the jobs report itself, sorted Wall Street into two main camps. Many top economists — including those at Morgan Stanley, Barclays Plc, and Bank of America Corp. — pointed to signs that the hiring slowdown was more about reduced labor supply, predicting that the Fed would wait to begin cutting rates until at least December.
Other economists — such as those at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., and UBS Group AG — interpreted the rapid deterioration in hiring more as a sign of weak labor demand, which would push the Fed to commence with rate reductions at its next policy meeting in September.
“We see little contradiction between slow employment growth and a low unemployment rate when the effects of immigration controls are taken into account,” Morgan Stanley economists led by Michael Gapen wrote in an Aug. 1 report following the release of the figures. Still, given how quickly hiring appears to be slowing, “it would not take much for us to alter our views,” they said.
Both sides marshaled various data points to support their analysis. The problem is that nothing amid the plethora of statistics contained in the jobs report itself can definitively answer the question one way or the other.
Immigration Policy
The report does include a breakdown of foreign and native-born workers based on a survey of households, and the numbers indicate the foreign-born workforce and population have fallen by about a million over the last three months — a number administration officials were quick to seize on in touting their immigration policy achievements.
“Since the president took office, he created about 2.5 million jobs for Americans, whereas we’ve eliminated about a million jobs for foreign-born workers,” Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an Aug. 1 CNN TV appearance.
“That’s a result of our strong immigration policy, of our strong border policy, keeping America safe,” said Miran, whom Trump nominated Thursday to fill a temporary slot on the Fed’s Board of Governors.
But many analysts, including those at Bloomberg Economics, have written off the decline in the labor force, noting it is largely related to how the data are constructed. Many economists point to a simultaneous, implausible surge in the native-born workforce and population numbers.
“It’s not that we’ve suddenly given birth to a lot of 16-year-olds and boosted the native population,” said Jonathan Pingle, the chief US economist at UBS.
With the report’s demographic breakdown based on the household survey looking increasingly questionable, analysts are trying to focus more on what the data on hiring from a survey of businesses — the one that saw the big downward revisions for May and June — is saying.
The best way to do that is to come up with a list of industries most reliant on an immigrant workforce and try to estimate whether those are faring obviously worse. And different people are drawing different conclusions from essentially the same exercise.
Bank of America economists highlighted weak hiring in construction, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality sectors, where undocumented immigrants and those who are losing their legal status are more likely to be employed. Goldman Sachs economists, meanwhile, noted industries most reliant on immigration aren’t really seeing slower job growth than, say, those disproportionately exposed to tariffs.
The labor force participation rate has fallen 0.4 percentage points over the last three months, marking the biggest such drop in eight years, excluding the onset of the pandemic.
Those who see immigration as the culprit behind the hiring slowdown cite the drop in participation as an indicator of dwindling supply. Citi’s Clark said worsening demand conditions could be weighing on it too.
The Treasury Department, the parent agency of the IRS, and DHS agreed to an arrangement in April to facilitate such data sharing — over the objections of the tax service’s privacy lawyers.
DHS officials have suggested they’d eventually ask the IRS for help locating 7 million people. There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to federal estimates
On Friday, though, the IRS responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3 percent of the names immigration enforcement officials submitted, the people said.
The names the agency could match were mainly those of individuals for whom DHS provided an individual taxpayer identification number. An ITIN is an IRS-specific ID that immigrants often use in place of a Social Security number on a tax filing. Undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year, which the ITINs help facilitate.
White House officials requested additional information on the taxpayers the IRS identified, the people said — specifically, if any of them had claimed the earned income tax credit, which can reduce the tax bill for some low-income filers. The IRS declined to provide that information, citing taxpayer privacy rights.
Long had previously told agency executives that his agency would not furnish confidential taxpayer information outside of the confines of the IRS’s agreement with DHS, the people said.
Still, the people did not know if tension over the IRS’s role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive contributed to Long’s departure from the IRS.
“The Trump administration is working in lockstep to eliminate information silos and to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of benefits meant for hardworking American taxpayers,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement.
DHS said in a statement that the agreement with the IRS “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected, while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations.”
“After four years of Joe Biden flooding the nation with illegal aliens, these processes streamline the pursuit of violent criminals, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense, all while protecting American citizens’ safety and data,” the statement said.
Officials at Treasury, which the IRS is part of, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Long on Friday said Trump intended to nominate him as the U.S. ambassador to Iceland, removing him from his post at the IRS after less than two months in the job. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will serve as the interim IRS commissioner. Trump administration officials confirmed both moves.
Long jokingly posted on social media Friday that he’d called Trump and asked to join ICE, or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I guess he thought I said Iceland?” Long wrote. “Oh well.”
Long had previously sparred with Treasury officials over plans to start tax filing season around Presidents’ Day in February — about a month behind schedule — and also preemptively announced plans to eliminate the IRS’s Direct File program, even though Treasury officials had not decided to do so, according to four people familiar with the events, who similarly spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Long, a former six-term Republican congressman from Missouri, was confirmed to the position in mid-June. Trump broke tradition by not allowing the former Biden-appointed IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, to serve out his full five-year term.
He was the sixth IRS leader since the start of the year. One early acting commissioner left amid churn at the agency due to the administration’s cost-cutting campaign led by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, while another left after the agency agreed to the DHS data-sharing arrangement. A third acting commissioner was pushed out after only two days because of an internal conflict between Musk and Bessent.
Remote Work Incentives Are Drawing People Back to America’s Heartland
After six years in Texas, Brandon Speece began feeling the pull of home. Originally from central Indiana, the 30-year-old data engineer was unsure about the costs of moving back—until he came across an unexpected opportunity. The Indianapolis suburb of Noblesville was offering remote workers $5,000 to relocate, along with added perks like concert tickets, co-working space access, and even time on the local golf course.
Speece and his fiancée accepted the offer and returned to Indiana in 2023. A year later, they bought a home—something that would’ve been far more difficult in Austin’s expensive housing market.
“The cash was the biggest help—we used it to hire movers,” Speece said. “But having the co-working space was great, and I won’t complain about the golf.”
What started as a pandemic-era experiment to revitalize small towns and cities in the American interior has grown into a full-fledged national trend. Programs that pay remote workers to relocate are spreading fast.
MakeMyMove, a platform that launched in 2020 to support these worker-relocation efforts, has expanded from 20 programs to over 178, spanning hundreds of towns and cities. The model depends on the persistence of remote work—a trend that surged during the pandemic and has remained steady. According to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, around 10% of the U.S. workforce is still fully remote as of 2023.
Local governments are betting that these workers can help reverse decades of population and talent loss. But it’s not a quick fix. Success depends on scale—moving enough people to truly boost the local economy—and investing in long-term retention.
“It’s not just about dangling a cash incentive,” said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a management professor at the London School of Economics. “You need sustained support to make people stay.”
On MakeMyMove, towns compete for a share of the estimated 17 million fully remote U.S. workers. Places like Terre Haute, Indiana; Columbus, Georgia; and Whitesburg, Kentucky, are offering relocation packages ranging from $5,000 to $7,500, often paired with extras like gym memberships, outdoor recreation passes, and even coffee meetings with the local mayor.
Tulsa Remote, one of the most successful and longest-running programs, has brought over 3,600 people to Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 2018. Funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the program offers $10,000 to each participant who commits to living in the city for at least one year. Around 70% of those who completed the program since 2019 still live there, and 23% of participants work in the tech industry.
A study by the W.E. Upjohn Institute found that for every dollar Tulsa Remote spent, the local economy saw over $4 in benefits—mostly from tax revenue and job creation. It also found the program to be six times more efficient at job creation than traditional business incentives.
Back in Noblesville, the city has welcomed 102 remote workers since 2022, bringing 253 new residents. The retention rate? A strong 90%. City officials project a $37.6 million economic impact over the next five years. The average household income of relocated workers is $80,000, and homes bought by program participants average nearly $500,000.
Mayor Chris Jensen sees these relocations as critical to the city’s future. “In Indiana—and probably across the country—you’re either growing or dying,” he said. Jensen hopes that attracting remote workers will not only boost the economy but also entice companies to establish offices in Noblesville. “We can offer business incentives all day long, but without a workforce, they don’t mean much,” he added.
In Eastern Kentucky, where the decline of coal has triggered a population drop, especially among younger and skilled residents, the EKY Remote program is helping to challenge negative stereotypes.
“Growing up here, you’re often told you have to leave to be successful,” said LaTasha Friend, who manages the program. “That hurts my heart.”
Since launching in 2024, EKY Remote has helped relocate 51 households from 27 states, totaling over 158 people and $7.4 million in household income.
Jessica Barry, 41, moved from Marble Falls, Texas, to Pike County, Kentucky, with her husband and two teenage daughters at the end of 2024. Drawn by the rural lifestyle, the family was welcomed by locals and school officials, thanks to EKY Remote’s hands-on approach.
Still, many programs are just getting started, and it’s too early to tell if they’ll scale. In Frankfort, Kentucky, just five remote workers have moved since a program launched in 2023. Their incentive includes $5,000, a bourbon distillery tour, and the chance to meet the mayor.
In Hutchinson, Kansas, Mayor Stacy Goss helped launch a program in nearby Reno County in January 2025. Seven offers have been extended so far, and one person has officially relocated. “It’s not listed in the package, but I plan to welcome them with a tray of cookies,” Goss joked.
For families like David and Devon Wellington’s, the shift to remote work brought unexpected opportunities. After David’s job in the Washington, D.C., area went fully remote, the couple began exploring relocation programs. Noblesville appealed thanks to affordable housing, good schools, and proximity to family in Indiana.
The Wellingtons sold their three-bedroom townhouse in D.C. for $640,000 and bought a five-bedroom home in a quiet Noblesville cul-de-sac for $600,000. The $5,000 incentive helped furnish their new space.
“We never pictured ourselves in Indiana,” said Wellington. “We’re both coasters. But this worked.”