Maryland’s Officials Keep Jet-Setting Abroad. Where Are the Results?

Gov. Moore’s Asia trip cost taxpayers $322,000. MOUs were signed. Deals? Still waiting.

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews

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Maryland taxpayers have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bankrolling international trade missions for their top officials in recent years — from Governor Wes Moore’s splashy trip to Japan and South Korea to Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich’s globe-trotting itinerary spanning Taiwan, India, Vietnam, China, and Japan. The pitch is always the same: these trips bring jobs and investment back home.

A new map of U.S. foreign direct investment from 2020 to 2025 suggests Maryland isn’t buying what its own officials are selling.

Maryland Trails Its Neighbors — By a Lot

According to data from fDi Intelligence compiled by Visual Capitalist, Maryland attracted just $10 billion in foreign direct investment between 2020 and 2025. That ranks the state well behind every major Mid-Atlantic competitor. Virginia pulled in $18 billion. Pennsylvania captured $17 billion. Even New Jersey, often dismissed as a pass-through state, outperformed Maryland at $13 billion.

North Carolina — a state that has aggressively recruited foreign manufacturers with pro-business tax policy rather than taxpayer-funded overseas junkets — landed $50 billion, five times Maryland’s haul. The map puts an uncomfortable number next to Maryland’s name, and no amount of diplomatic rebranding changes it.

The national context makes it worse. The U.S. attracted $966 billion in announced foreign investment over that period, with half of it flowing to just five states. Maryland wasn’t one of them.

The Governor’s $322,000 Promise

Governor Moore’s international trip to Japan and South Korea cost Maryland taxpayers $322,000 — roughly $72,000 more than originally estimated. The April trade mission focused on quantum, life sciences, and aerospace industries, with representatives from the Maryland Department of Commerce, Department of Transportation, and the private sector making the trip.

Moore returned promising the trip would produce a “tangible return on investment” that would show itself “not in years, but in months and in weeks.” The most tangible result came in September 2025, when Hitachi Rail opened a $100 million factory in Hagerstown, creating up to 500 jobs and securing more than $2 billion in initial contracts with transit systems in Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. Moore had met with Hitachi’s executive chairman and leadership during the Asia trip.

But how much credit belongs to Moore is a fair question. Hitachi broke ground on the Hagerstown site in 2022, two years before Moore took office, under then-Governor Larry Hogan. The relationship predates the $322,000 trip. What Moore’s office can reasonably claim is that the Asia mission reinforced an existing partnership — not that it created one. Beyond Hitachi, the governor had not unveiled additional verified investment deals in the weeks following his return, despite his promise of results coming in “months and weeks.”

The other formal outcomes from the trip were seven memoranda of understanding — non-binding diplomatic agreements, not contracts, not jobs, and not investment.

Elrich’s Frequent Flyer Problem

At the county level, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich has logged more overseas miles than any other Maryland official in recent years. Since taking office in 2018, he has led trade missions to Taiwan, India, Vietnam, South Korea, China, and Japan — his sixth such trip abroad wrapping up in late October 2025, a 13-day mission to China and Japan accompanied by Council Vice President Will Jawando and the county’s director of economic development special projects.

The results are more concrete than the article’s critics might expect — and still less transparent than taxpayers deserve.

On the concrete side: two Chinese firms signed memoranda of understanding committing to establish a U.S. presence in Montgomery County following the China/Japan trip. A UK-based cybersecurity firm, Risk Ledger, announced it would open an office at the county’s Rockville Innovation Center following Elrich’s most recent April 2026 Taiwan and India mission. A satellite components manufacturer was also reported to be finalizing a license agreement for space at the same center. More than 30 county-based companies have joined Elrich on his various missions, using the trips to build their own international partnerships.

On the accountability side: the cost of Elrich’s most recent trip remained undisclosed at the time of his return, with a spokesperson promising transparency once a final figure was determined. That figure has not been prominently reported. Across six missions in three years, there is no publicly available, audited accounting of total taxpayer expenditure versus verified investment attracted — no scoreboard, no return-on-investment analysis, no independent verification that the MOUs signed ever translated into jobs or capital.

“Opened doors” and “concrete results,” as Elrich describes them, may well be true in some cases. But without a transparent ledger, Maryland residents have no way to evaluate whether they’re getting a fair return — or subsidizing a term-limited executive’s farewell tour of global capitals.

The Broader Business Climate Problem

Here’s what no trade mission can fix: Maryland is becoming a harder place to do business, regardless of how many flights its leaders board.

Maryland dropped nine places in CNBC’s Best States for Business rankings, falling from 22nd in 2023 to 31st in 2024. Business friendliness fell 13 spots to 37th, and the cost of doing business ranked 47th — placing Maryland among the most expensive states in the country. Foreign investors don’t just respond to a governor shaking hands in Tokyo. They respond to tax rates, regulatory environments, infrastructure, and workforce availability. On several of those measures, Maryland is actively losing ground to states that are winning the foreign investment competition without sending their executives abroad six times in three years.

Maryland faces mounting challenges, including domestic migration to other states, a stagnant population, lackluster business growth, and a growing budget deficit. Those are structural problems. Memoranda of understanding don’t solve them.

The Accountability Question

The question isn’t whether trade missions can ever work — in the right context, they can. The question is whether Maryland’s Democratic leadership is treating these trips with the transparency and measurable accountability that taxpayers deserve, or whether they’ve become a perk of the job dressed up in economic development language.

For $322,000, Marylanders got a maglev train ride and seven non-binding agreements. For six overseas trips in three years from a term-limited county executive on his way out the door, Montgomery County got two companies that are “interested.”

Meanwhile, $10 billion in foreign investment — less than a third of what North Carolina attracted — sits as Maryland’s five-year report card. Until the Moore administration and county officials like Elrich can produce audited, verified returns tied directly to specific taxpayer-funded travel, voters have every right to ask a simple question: were these trips business — or just travel?

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MDBayNews will continue tracking foreign investment outcomes from Maryland’s trade missions. Have a tip? Contact us.

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Sources: Foreign direct investment figures by state from fDi Intelligence, as compiled by Visual Capitalist, “Mapped: Foreign Investment by U.S. State, 2020–2025.” Trip cost and trade mission details from the Baltimore Sun and Fox Baltimore, August 21, 2025. Trade mission itinerary and focus areas from CBS Baltimore and WMAR2 News, March–April 2025. Post-trip deal accounting from Fox Baltimore, May 7, 2025. Montgomery County trade mission details from The Baltimore Banner, Bethesda Magazine, and Montgomery Community Media, October–November 2025. Maryland business climate rankings from the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, citing CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business 2024. U.S. trade representative data on Maryland foreign-controlled employment from USTR.gov.

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