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The Trump administration’s planned cuts have hit close to home for Vice President JD Vance.
A $500 million grant for steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF+0.21%) to help the company upgrade its aging blast furnaces in Middletown, Ohio will not go forward, CNN reports. Middletown is the hometown of the vice-president and featured prominently in his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The new furnaces, which run on climate-friendly hydrogen, natural gas, and electricity instead of coal, would have helped revitalize the aging steel facility. The grant was awarded by the Biden administration.
The Middletown Works was founded in 1899 as the American Rolling Mill Company and became AK Steel in the 1990s when a Japanese firm, Kawakasi Steel, bought it. USA steel maker Cleveland Cliffs purchased AK Steel in 2020.
Steel companies Armco and AK Steel both played prominently in Vance’s book. In it, he wrote:
For my grandparents, Armco was an economic savior — the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class. My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel.
The hulking and sprawling steel mill dominates the small city of 50,000 situated between Dayton and Cincinnati. It employs over 2000 workers.
“If they decide not to go through with it, that’s 170 jobs we won’t be getting in the next five years,” Shawn Coffey, president of the union representing workers at the mill, told CNN (WBD-1.42%): “Does it change the outlook of Middletown works? It depends on what the future holds. We’ll regroup and continue to make steel in Middletown the best we can.”