Designed in the US Is Not Built in the US
Designed in the US Is Not Built in the US
A line on a spec sheet says “designed in the United States,” and a reader fills in the rest. The assumption is that the thing was also made here, or mostly here, by people and machines the buyer could point to if asked. Sometimes that is true. The phrase itself promises none of it.
For defense autonomy the gap matters more than it does for consumer goods, because the buyer is often legally required to know the answer. This post lays out the three public yardsticks that govern “American-made” for robotics hardware, why they measure different things, and what a careful buyer should ask a supplier. It is an industry-level argument built on public regulation. It describes no system, customer, or program.
Design provenance and manufacturing provenance are separate claims
Design provenance answers who decided what the part is: the geometry, the control law, the tolerances, the firmware. Manufacturing provenance answers where the material was formed, where the part was cut or wound or cast, where it was assembled and tested, and who controls the tooling that does it.
A US design team can specify a part that only a foreign supplier can make at the required quality. A US factory can assemble a robot from subassemblies it receives sealed. In both cases the sentence “designed in the US” is accurate and tells you almost nothing about who could stop the line, who sees the process, or what happens to delivery schedules when a border or a sanction moves.
We have written before about owning the stack and about component provenance. Those pieces ask where the parts came from. This one asks where the making happened.
Three yardsticks, three different questions
The consumer-claim standard. Under the FTC’s Made in USA Labeling Rule (16 CFR Part 323, effective August 2021), an unqualified claim that a product is made, built, or manufactured in the United States has to meet a high bar: final assembly or processing in the US, all significant processing in the US, and all or virtually all components made and sourced here. The rule governs marketing claims, so it constrains what a supplier may say. It does not set a procurement threshold, and “designed in” is not an origin claim under it at all.
The federal supply test. The Buy American Act, as implemented at FAR 25.101, asks two things of a “domestic end product.” The article must be manufactured in the United States, and the cost of its domestic components must exceed a set share of the cost of all components. That share is 65 percent for items delivered in calendar years 2024 through 2028 and rises to 75 percent for items delivered from 2029 on. Notice what is counted: component cost. Design effort is not a component, and neither is the engineering salary behind it. A robot designed entirely in the US can fail the test on component cost alone.
Material-specific rules. Alongside the end-product test sit rules tied to particular inputs. Our earlier guide to the DFARS magnet restrictions covers one that reaches down to where a specific material was melted and produced. A product can meet the general domestic-content percentage and still carry an input that fails a rule written for that input.
These tests are not redundant. One governs what you may claim to a consumer, one governs what a federal buyer may accept as a domestic end product, and one governs a particular material. A supplier can pass one and fail the others, and “designed in the US” appears in none of them.
Why this bites harder in robotics
Robots are assemblies of assemblies. An actuator alone combines a motor, a gear stage, bearings, a sensor, a drive board, and a housing, each with its own supply chain. Because the Buy American test counts component cost, a handful of expensive foreign subassemblies can move a product across the line even when final assembly sits in a US facility. The 2024 step to 65 percent and the scheduled step to 75 percent in 2029 reduce the room for that.
There is also the matter of the machines. Manufacturing capability is more than a factory address. It includes who owns the tooling, who holds the process know-how, and whether the work could be moved or restarted without a foreign counterparty’s cooperation. This is the part the percentage tests do not capture, and it is what sovereignty means in practice: the ability to keep making the thing when a supplier relationship changes.
What a careful buyer asks
Questions that separate the claims, in the order we would ask them:
- Where is final assembly performed, and by whom?
- Which subassemblies are made in-house and which are bought in? Where is each made?
- For the domestic-content test, how is component cost calculated, and has the supplier run the calculation for the delivery year in question?
- Which tooling and test equipment is owned by the supplier, and which is rented or controlled by someone else?
- If one named foreign source disappeared next quarter, what stops?
None of these needs a trade secret to answer. A supplier who can answer them plainly is telling you something. A supplier who answers with the design story is telling you something else.
Where this leaves a domestic builder
The honest position for a US robotics company is narrower than the slogan. Make the claim you can document. Say “designed in the United States” when that is the whole truth, and say separately what is made here, to what percentage, and what is not. Early in a program the answers will be incomplete. That is acceptable. An incomplete answer stated plainly keeps a buyer’s trust, and an overstated one tends to surface in an audit.
Rebuilding a domestic capability is slow and it costs more per unit at first. The reason to do it is not the label. The reason is that a supply chain you can see into is one you can keep running.
This post discusses public regulations for general information and is not legal advice. Check the current text of the cited rules before relying on them for a procurement decision.