When it was signed, less than two years ago, the deal that Wisconsin struck with the electronics giant Foxconn contained all kinds of headline-grabbing numbers: the company promised a ten-billion-dollar investment in the state, a new 21.5-million-square-foot campus for manufacturing L.C.D. screens, and as many as thirteen thousand new jobs, paying an average wage of fifty-four thousand dollars a year. The manufacturing facility would be the Taiwan-based company’s first U.S. factory, and the prospect stirred the hopes of a region that still dreams of clawing back the middle-class factory jobs that were its pride in the middle of the twentieth century and that it lost to foreign competition long ago. As Dan Kaufman wrote for The New Yorker last year, the deal also appeared poised to give a boost to the reëlection prospects of Scott Walker, the conservative Republican who was then Wisconsin’s governor, who transformed the state into a bastion of conservative, free-market politics.

But since then Wisconsinites have found out a lot more about the $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies that Foxconn was promised—money the company was being given despite the dramatic cuts that the state has made, in recent years, to education, infrastructure, and other public spending—along with the pollution waivers and special legal privileges that it was granted and the bulldozing of neighborhoods that it needed to acquire the land it wanted. Many in the state soured on the deal, and, when Election Day came, in November, Walker lost to his Democratic opponent, Tony Evers, who had strongly criticized the Foxconn deal.

Since the Foxconn deal was initially struck, it has looked worse and worse. First the company announced that it was scaling down its plan for the manufacturing facility: it would need only three thousand workers, and, because much of the production at the facility would be automated, many of the jobs would be for “knowledge workers,” not blue-collar workers. Then, on Wednesday, a company representative told Reuters, plainly, “In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory.” Although the company once planned to hire more than five thousand people by the end of 2020, it now expects the number to be closer to a thousand, and most of those will be in research and design positions. The manufacturing facility that President Trump, at a groundbreaking ceremony last year, called “the eighth wonder of the world” seems unlikely to even qualify as the eighth wonder of southeast Wisconsin.

I spoke to Kaufman on Wednesday about the latest news. “It’s not a surprise,” he said. “But it’s still shocking.” He read to me a part of the Reuters report, in which a Foxconn official explained that, “Rather than manufacturing LCD panels in the United States . . . it would be more profitable to make them in greater China and Japan, ship them to Mexico for final assembly, and import the finished product to the United States.” Kaufman wondered how it was possible for this leading global company to just now reach this conclusion. “They’ve never been particularly forthright,” he said. “To claim that it’s news that U.S. manufacturing costs are higher—it defies belief; this is the model companies have been using for a long time.”

What happens to the deal now is unclear. According to Reuters, Foxconn already missed certain hiring and investment goals, in 2018, that made it ineligible for tax subsidies, and a source told the news wire that the company “may be prepared to walk away from future incentives if it is unable to meet Wisconsin’s job creation and capital investment requirements.” A few weeks ago, Republicans in Wisconsin’s state legislature passed measures to limit certain powers of the governor, in anticipation of Evers taking office. One area Republican legislators targeted was the governor’s control over the economic agency that helped craft the Foxconn deal and remains the company’s liaison with the state. Reuters reported that Foxconn’s C.E.O., Terry Gou, intends to meet with Evers later this year. But certain parts of the deal are irreversible. “They’ve redirected millions of dollars of highway money to support Foxconn's project and already cleared a lot of homeowners from the area, which is one of the tragedies of this deal,” Kaufman said. “And who knows what will be built in the end? There has been no transparency at all about this deal.”