Juan Ciscomani Jobs Taxes Arizona

700 People in Casa Grande Lost Their Jobs. Six Weeks Later, Juan Ciscomani Brought the Speaker of the House There to Celebrate.

Lucid cut about 700 jobs at its Casa Grande plant in June. In August, Ciscomani hosted Mike Johnson and Scott Bessent in that same town for a roundtable on how well the tax law is working.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

700 People in Casa Grande Lost Their Jobs. Six Weeks Later, Juan Ciscomani Brought the Speaker of the House There to Celebrate.

On June 23, 2026, Lucid Motors told its workers in Casa Grande, Arizona that about 700 of them were losing their jobs. The electric-vehicle maker was cutting 18 percent of its U.S. workforce. The company said the move was about aligning production with demand and cutting inventory.

Casa Grande is a small city in Pinal County, and Lucid was supposed to be its future.

On August 5 — six weeks later — Juan Ciscomani brought Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Casa Grande for a roundtable about how well the economy is going.

Not to meet the laid-off workers. To a different factory, to talk about the tax law that Ciscomani had voted for.

What the town actually looked like that summer

Local TV went to Casa Grande the day after the layoffs were announced and talked to people.

Melody Johnson's husband was one of the workers who lost his job.

"Every time we were holding our breath. We're still in shock and we have to figure out how we're gonna pay our mortgage and get insurance again. That's been the biggest thing. We've taken a huge hit and we're just trying to pick up the pieces right now."

Michael Hill manages the Cook-E-Jar Bakery and Cafe. He said Lucid workers had been as much as 15 percent of his regular business. He also said he knew bartenders who had landed jobs at the plant and were thrilled about it, "only to be let go shortly after."

Roy Delsi, a longtime resident, put it shorter: "If you want to get laid off, work there." And: "Now it looks like it's gonna be a black eye to the community."

That's what 700 jobs leaving a small city sounds like from the inside.

The part Ciscomani owns

Casa Grande is in Ciscomani's district. He says so himself — his own office titled the August press release "Ciscomani Hosts Speaker Johnson, Secretary Bessent at Rural 6th District Manufacturing Facility."

He also voted, as part of Trump's budget bill, to phase out the clean-energy tax credits that had been fueling the electric-vehicle business — including the $7,500 credit people got for buying one.

What happened next is not a matter of opinion. Cox Automotive, which tracks car sales for the industry, found that electric vehicles were 10.5 percent of new U.S. vehicle sales in the third quarter of 2025 — and 5.8 percent in the fourth, immediately after those incentives were revoked at the start of October. Q4 EV sales came in at 234,000 vehicles, 36 percent below the year before.

Lucid saw it coming. As E&E News reported in July, the company warned investors in February that the tax law's elimination of the EV credit and of penalties for emissions violations, "along with other factors," could "reduce demand for our products and have a material adverse effect on our business, prospects, results of operations and financial condition."

Ciscomani saw it coming too. Before the final vote, he was one of 13 House Republicans who signed a letter urging the Senate to scale back the clean-energy cuts in the bill they had just passed.

Then he voted for the bill anyway. Asked about it afterward by E&E News, he said: "I'm very proud of that whole bill."

This is a habit, not an accident. We've documented the same pattern in his campaign advertising: say the reassuring thing, do the other thing, count on nobody checking.

He wasn't the only one who noticed the timing

The day Johnson and Bessent flew in, Senator Ruben Gallego sent Bessent a letter asking him to spend part of the trip somewhere other than a photo op.

Gallego wrote that since June, multiple clean-energy manufacturing and generation companies had announced cancellations and workforce cuts in Pinal County, and that "over 700 workers have been laid off in just the last two months." Nationally, he put the damage at 223 manufacturing, clean energy and industrial projects facing cancellation or delay, at least $82.8 billion in capital investment, and as many as 111,765 jobs.

"These job losses will negatively impact the entire local economy," he wrote.

Nobody from the roundtable went to see those workers.

What they said instead

Here is Ciscomani, in his own press release, from the town where 700 jobs had just vanished:

"I'm incredibly honored to have welcomed Speaker Mike Johnson and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Arizona's Sixth District to see the real, tangible impact of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. Manufacturing has long been a cornerstone of rural Arizona's economy, supporting hundreds of local jobs and strengthening communities across our district."

Speaker Johnson said American manufacturing is "roaring back to life."

Bessent said "the promise of the American Dream is extending to every factory floor."

Six weeks earlier, on another factory floor in the same town, 700 people had been told to clear out their lockers.

Why this one matters

Every politician holds events at factories. That's not the story.

The story is that Ciscomani had a choice about which factory. One of them is a Frito-Lay plant with a good news release attached. The other is an EV plant where his own vote helped knock the legs out from under demand, and where Melody Johnson's family is now trying to figure out the mortgage.

He picked the one with the Speaker of the House in it.

When the tax credits propping up his district's electric-vehicle plant were on the chopping block, Ciscomani wrote a letter saying cutting them was a bad idea, voted to cut them anyway, and now says he's proud of the whole thing.

Voters in the 6th District will decide in November whether "proud of that whole bill" is what they wanted their vote to buy.