Onshoring Is Coming Back. So Is the Lying About It.

I keep reading headlines about factories coming home, new plants breaking ground, and billions being poured into reshoring. Good. It’s about time. But there is another question that deserves a lot more attention: How do we actually know any of it is real?

That’s not a new question for HG. For more than 27 years, Fortune 100 companies, general counsel offices, security teams, and risk professionals have brought us in to vet supply chains before agreements are signed, verify business partners and critical vendors, identify ownership and stakeholders, and figure out whether the story on paper matches what is actually happening. Onshoring is a new arena. It is not new work. The investigative problem is remarkably familiar.

What “onshoring integrity” actually means

Strip away the economics jargon and it’s pretty simple. When a company says, “we built this plant in Ohio,” or “this part is Made in America,” or “we moved our supply chain home to qualify for this tariff break,” somebody eventually has to determine whether that’s true. Who really owns the plant? Where do the materials actually come from? Who owns the suppliers behind the supplier? Where is the product actually manufactured? Are the jobs and manufacturing capacity real? Does the documentation reflect reality? Those questions matter because the incentive to manipulate the answers is getting larger, and we already know it happens.

In August 2026, GSA announced that it had discovered products on federal procurement platforms identified as “Country of Origin: USA” that were actually from China and other foreign countries. The products included flash drives, docking ports, and portable charging devices, exactly the kinds of technology where country of origin can create security concerns.

This wasn’t simply a private company fooling an unsophisticated buyer. These products made their way into a federal procurement system surrounded by rules, certifications, oversight, and institutions specifically intended to protect government purchasing. And it wasn’t the first time. Years earlier, investigators uncovered Aventura Technologies selling Chinese manufactured surveillance and security equipment to the U.S. government while representing it as American made. Some equipment arrived from China already marked with the company’s logo, an American flag, and “Made in USA.” The company received more than $20 million in federal contracts.

That should tell us something. A label is not verification. A certification is not verification. A database entry is not verification. And the existence of an oversight process does not necessarily mean somebody independently established that the underlying claim was true.

Why this matters now

The federal government is putting substantial incentives behind rebuilding American manufacturing capacity. In July 2026, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, describing the need to reconnect American scientific discovery with domestic manufacturing. Federal research priorities are increasingly emphasizing manufacturing capability and domestic capacity. At the same time, the government is signaling greater attention to false domestic manufacturing claims and country of origin representations.

That’s important because whenever government changes the financial incentives, people change their behavior. Most will play by the rules. Some won’t. The question is whether verification capacity will grow as quickly as the incentives being created.

Doesn’t the government already vet this stuff?

Yes, and that distinction matters. The federal government has inspectors general, GAO, DCSA, contracting officers, compliance programs, investigative agencies, procurement rules, security requirements, and numerous other mechanisms intended to identify fraud, security problems, ownership concerns, and false representations. The problem isn’t that these institutions don’t exist. The problem is assuming their existence eliminates the risk.

Government oversight reports repeatedly identify gaps after significant amounts of money, time, technology, and personnel have already been committed to solving them. Personnel vetting provides one example. DOD has spent billions developing and maintaining systems intended to improve federal personnel vetting, yet GAO continues to document missed milestones, system problems, and unreliable information. In one recent review, GAO found that more than 60 percent of the security clearance data it examined was inaccurate or incomplete.

That doesn’t mean the people doing the work are incompetent, and it doesn’t mean additional resources are never necessary. It means something much simpler: money, mandates, systems, and institutions do not remove the need to verify. Sometimes the control itself needs to be tested.

Nobody should assume only honest builders see the opportunity

Money on the table attracts more than honest builders. New onshoring incentives, new research entities, new suppliers entering the defense industrial base, new joint ventures, and new manufacturing relationships all create opportunity. They also create targets.

A company may disguise foreign ownership to qualify for domestic preferences. A foreign controlled entity may operate through layers of legitimate looking companies. Components can move through intermediary countries. Documentation can be technically accurate while hiding the larger relationship. A supplier can misrepresent where something was manufactured. And competitors or foreign actors can target the people carrying the process knowledge that makes new American manufacturing valuable in the first place.

These aren’t all the same problem. Some are fraud. Some are due diligence problems. Some are supply chain problems. Some involve foreign ownership, control, or influence. Others may raise counterintelligence or intellectual property concerns. But they share one characteristic: The organization making the decision cannot afford to rely entirely on what it has been told. That is where investigation and intelligence tradecraft become important.

A word to manufacturers, investors, and primes

Don’t assume Washington will build all of the guardrails for you. Ask harder questions before somebody else asks them for you.

Can you independently establish who ultimately owns and controls the companies entering your supply chain? Can you trace where critical materials and components actually originate? Do you know whether the company represented on paper is the company actually performing the work? Would your Made in America claims survive scrutiny beyond the certifications provided by your suppliers? Do you know which organizations or individuals have an incentive to conceal ownership, sourcing, affiliations, or relationships?

And if a regulator, prime contractor, investor, customer, investigator, or reporter challenged those claims tomorrow, could you produce the evidence? Those aren’t theoretical questions anymore. They are becoming business questions.

Where this is headed

The rebuilding of American manufacturing capacity is going to create enormous opportunity. It will also create an enormous amount of information that somebody has to verify. The government will build rules. Agencies will create processes. Compliance departments will create forms. Contractors will make certifications. Databases will collect information. All of those things matter.

But somebody still has to ask the investigator’s question: How do we know this is actually true?

That question has been at the center of HG’s work for more than 27 years. Onshoring simply gives us a new place where it needs to be asked.