The steel plant that saved Vance's family from poverty is getting $500M from Biden. One worker says that ‘doesn't really change anything’

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — A steel plant at the edge of this riverside town played a pivotal role in the family history of Sen. JD Vance.

The plant, Vance wrote in his memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," was nothing less than an “economic savior” for his grandparents. A steady job there for his “Papaw” is what lifted his grandparents “from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class.”

Decades later, the plant is still there — churning out steel for U.S. automakers and providing work for about 2,500 people.

Its future looks bright too, thanks in part to a grant of up to $500 million from the Biden administration . The money is aimed at helping its owners replace a coal-fired blast furnace so that steel can be produced with clean hydrogen and natural gas — improvements that would cut climate and air pollution and help ensure the plant stays open for another generation.

But the political benefits for the Biden administration — and by extension Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee — are less clear. This is true not just in Middletown but in similar communities across the country that are on track to receive funding from either the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure law, arguably the two biggest domestic accomplishments of President Joe Biden’s time in the White House.

Both measures remain largely unknown to the public, polling has shown. Perhaps as worrisome for Harris is that the federal investments may not do much to break the country’s partisan divide, even in places that have benefited from the spending.

Interviews with more than three dozen people across Middletown over three days in late July revealed that few people knew about the grant. Of those who did, a handful applauded the Biden administration but several people said it didn’t matter or credited someone else.

The federal funding “doesn’t really change anything,” said Tyler Kirby, who sat outside the steel plant on a simmering July night, eating a hamburger and waiting for the start of his 12-hour overnight shift fixing cranes.

Kirby said he planned to vote for former President Donald Trump, who chose Vance last month as his running mate atop the Republican presidential ticket.

“I don't really look for the government to do anything for you,” he said. “It's more like just stay out of my way.”

Both Trump and Vance have attacked the Inflation Reduction Act as a “green new scam” and promised to repeal or weaken it. The Middletown plant could become collateral damage if they attack the legislation broadly and if funding for the project has not been distributed by early next year.

“I will terminate Kamala Harris's green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds, give all of the unspent funds back to building roads, bridges and give it back to the government,” Trump said at a North Carolina rally last week.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to a request for comment on what the candidates would do with the Biden grant for the Middletown steel plant.

Trump has pledged to revive American manufacturing in the Rust Belt, but he has not outlined a specific policy plan during this campaign. When he was president, Trump’s policy to boost manufacturing largely centered on import tariffs, trade wars and corporate tax cuts.

His administration also slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel imports. But that strategy was largely ineffective, and manufacturing jobs — even before Covid-19 hit — continued to plunge throughout his presidency, especially in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Vance’s position on helping the steel industry has centered on cutting and weakening regulations on the heavy-polluting sector.

Last year, Vance called on EPA to abandon a rule that would have forced steel plants to reduce the type of carcinogenic emissions that pollute communities such as his hometown. He also contended that cutting power plants’ greenhouse gas pollution would devastate the steel industry .

“I have not been shy about the threat that this administration’s climate agenda poses for the future of our nation’s steel production and industrial base,” he wrote to EPA Administrator Michael Regan in December, adding later, “Your administration’s aggressive prosecution of climate goals and emissions targets is already greenwashing much of the steel sector to its detriment.”

Meanwhile, signs indicate that Biden’s clean energy grants and tax incentives have helped spur thousands of new jobs at more than 500 manufacturing sites across the United States.

That helps explain why 18 congressional Republicans have asked their leaders not to destroy the Inflation Reduction Act — even if the policy has flown under the radar of many Americans.

Experts and analysts say there are several reasons the Biden administration’s spending hasn’t resonated more broadly. Poor political messaging is one. Entrenched political partisanship is another.

Yet another is the fact that much of the money has yet to go out the door.

About a fifth of the $1.1 trillion in direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure approved by Congress and the Biden administration has been spent as of April, according to an analysis by POLITICO and POLITICO's E&E News.

Administration officials have blamed the slow rollout on obstacles including red tape, a lack of urgency from states and the challenge of approving an unprecedented wave of new projects.

Yet even in places such as Middletown, located in Butler County, which Trump easily carried in the 2020 election, signs emerged that some of Biden’s investments have won supporters.

One of those is Alexi Grams.

She said she wakes up most mornings to a car and lawn covered in black soot from the steel plant and its blast furnaces that — for now — run on coke derived from coal.

The soot prompted Grams to get a membership to a car wash because she has to go so often. And as a mother of a toddler with another child on the way, Grams said she worries how the pollution will affect her kids.

If federal funding for the plant upgrades can help cut the soot, she said, it could be enough to get her to vote this year for Harris.

“I feel like she might just be something different,” she said. “It might work this time.”

Steel plant is the ‘lifeblood’ of Middletown

Middletown’s Cleveland-Cliffs plant has been churning out steel in southwest Ohio since the William McKinley administration 125 years ago.

Originally founded as the American Rolling Mill Co., or Armco, the plant’s history tells the story of the Rust Belt. It grew and prospered for decades around the two world wars, as did Middletown, where one in every five homes once belonged to an Armco employee. As the plant grew, so did its demand for workers, and it recruited heavily in Appalachia.

One of those who traveled the “Hillbilly Highway” north was Jim Vance, as his grandson JD recounted in his book.

The 1970s and 1980s were less prosperous. The economic challenges of those decades caused the industry to stumble, and waves of layoffs hit — shrinking the workforce of Middletown’s plant from 7,000 to roughly a third of that number today.

Armco became AK Steel after joining with Kawasaki Steel in 1989 and then was acquired by Cleveland-Cliffs in 2020. Middletown’s once-bustling downtown slowed down as businesses closed. Plywood-covered storefronts still pockmark the city center.

And yet, Middletown is still very much a steel town.

Mayor Elizabeth Slamka calls the Middletown Works steel plant the “lifeblood” of the community. Everyone in town has some connection, including her own parents, who met through Armco connections when her father worked there.

“If they don't work there themselves, then they have a family member or a friend or somebody who is connected,” she said.

About 2,500 people work there now, with another 1,500 employed by businesses that serve the plant such as scrap metal recyclers, trucking and infrastructure maintenance. Hundreds more jobs in restaurants, bars, auto mechanic shops and service industries are indirectly supported by plant employees.

The repowering will create about 200 permanent new jobs as well as 1,200 temporary construction jobs. Slamka said the investment also will allow the town to increase its police force and hire for other essential government jobs that have been trimmed in leaner times.

The federal grant the Department of Energy announced earlier this year is worth up to $500 million and adds to a $1.3 billion contribution from Cleveland-Cliffs. The money would help the plant cut emissions by up to 90 percent.

The funding will save the company about $500 million in annual costs and will help the plant transform from being one of the dirtiest steel plants in the country to one of the cleanest, according to the Biden administration. And it will be an economic driver of a hydrogen market that can be used to repower other Midwestern plants.

“Consumers and companies around the world are demanding cleaner, greener products — made with less pollution, made with recycled materials, built to last,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said when she visited the plant in March to announce the grant. She added, “What you do here in Middletown, we'll be looking at how we can replicate that in places all across the country.”

It also could drive a hydrogen-based manufacturing hub in the region. That’s important because there isn’t much of a hydrogen market for companies looking to lessen their carbon pollution and stay competitive, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves told reporters when the project was announced.

“It’s like the chicken and egg,” Goncalves said. “Nobody uses hydrogen because there’s no hydrogen, and there’s no hydrogen because nobody uses hydrogen. So now they can run the plant at break-even. Everything else that they can sell to others will be on top. So, I can make the hydrogen hub viable.”

For Biden and Harris, the plant is a poster child for their argument that climate policy doesn’t have to be a choice between helping the economy and cutting emissions. It shows how America’s historical manufacturing base can be a key part of its carbon-free future while saving money and jobs.

And it calls into question the claims by Vance and Trump that climate policy destroys jobs and empowers China.

Trump has pledged to strip away the IRA’s provisions and to block any more of its funding from being distributed. That could include the Middletown plant.

Climate politics and the 2024 election

At the City Tavern — a bar where Democratic and Republican steelworkers have long nursed a Budweiser together after shift — some people expressed concern that Trump and Vance could take away the grant.

“I haven’t heard anything about Trump continuing this project. I was thinking he’d probably cancel this project,” said Gary Combs, a former Armco worker, who was excited about the promise of a new hydrogen hub and said he likely would vote for Harris.

At the next bar stool, Gary Hines, who voted twice for Trump, still wasn’t sure how he would vote but said the investment should have happened 20 years ago. Hines, who worked the plant’s blast furnace in the 1980s, had faith that Trump would not cancel the funding.

“I don't know if that’s going to influence how I vote,” he said. “I’ve got to listen to what they both say, but I do think it's a wise thing. I do think it'll be good, I think it’s needed.”

Ohio has shifted away from its swing-state status in recent presidential elections, moving solidly Republican, and there’s no indication this year will be any different.

But Ohio’s demographics closely resemble other key swing states, in particular Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Vance was brought in by the Trump team to help win those states with a blue-collar message about bringing back their jobs.

Most Americans have not seen, read or heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law, according to polling conducted by POLITICO in May. The IRA is the better known, though only 17 percent of respondents said they had heard “a lot” about the law while 35 percent said they heard “some” and the rest knew little to nothing.

As is the case in Middletown, many people in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don’t acknowledge the law’s champions, the poll showed. Just 42 percent of respondents gave Biden credit for infrastructure improvements while 36 percent gave Trump credit, though he never passed a major infrastructure bill.

At a rally in Middletown late last month, Vance did not mention the plant despite his own personal connections and its central role in the region’s economy. He told the crowd that increasing reliance on fossil fuels “helps our manufacturers make more of our own stuff and become more self-reliant in our own country.”

That message hit home with supporters.

Victoria Hensley, who was at the rally, said Vance would create more manufacturing jobs at the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.

“He's gonna fight for us,” she said. “Because I think we have been forgotten in the mainstream and in Washington, like the regular people that go to work every day and pay their taxes.”

At the steel plant, some even credited Vance for the grant.

“This plant is always going to be here,” said Jeff Krznarich, who traps animals on the plant property. “See what JD Vance can do for this town.”

Biden and Harris are not getting credit

Ineffective political messaging and raw partisanship have contributed to few people knowing about the law, observers said.

One issue is that Democrats tend to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act as a climate law, but it’s really a rejuvenation of manufacturing, said RL Miller, president of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote and a former Democratic National Committee member.

That’s a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s claims that he revitalized the manufacturing sector, when really it’s Biden’s policy that is causing a clean energy jobs boom, she said. The law has created more than 300,000 jobs in manufacturing, construction and more, according to Climate Power , a climate advocacy group. No one is hearing that from the top of the ticket in a way that has resonated, she said.

“The Democrats have done a mediocre job of messaging on it,” Miller said, even though she has pressed DNC and campaign officials to do more. “Biden and congressional Democrats are saying ‘we passed the largest climate bill since ever’ and everybody cheers and moves on, but that doesn't do any good.”

Entrenched political partisanship is another reason.

The rollout of the Inflation Reduction Act is similar to the Affordable Care Act, which was demonized by many when then-President Barack Obama signed it in 2010, said John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser for international climate policy at the White House. Podesta has been tasked with overseeing the implementation of the IRA funding.

But as more people heard about Obamacare, they came to support the law, he said. With the IRA, “as neighbors talk to neighbors, I think that the benefits that are included in this bill will spread,” he said.

“We need to keep talking about it, but we need the companies to keep talking about it,” he said.

Cleveland-Cliffs did not return a request for comment.

In Pennsylvania and other areas of the Rust Belt, the primary problem has been that the funding has been slow to roll out and so most people have no idea about how they can benefit from the law, said Christopher Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College. He echoed Podesta and said as funding goes out and projects start construction, opinions would shift.

“That will change, but it probably won't change enough in time for the election to make a gigantic difference,” he said. “And that's what has been frustrating for Democrats who know when you ask people and you frame it for them, they might not know a lot about it, but when you tell them about it, they say, ‘Well, that's pretty good.’”

For some who work at the plant, the new funding is a sign the facility will be a clean resource for generations to come.

Workers at the plant have long been worried that it was getting so outdated it could close, said Aaron Morgan, who helps repair pipes inside the facility.

Morgan said the new investment shows workers that nobody will lose their jobs and that the government is finally taking stronger action on climate change.

“It’s about time they started taking climate and how things work more seriously, using our natural resources,” he said.