The F-22 tooling and process documentation still exists in full at the Sierra Army Depot in California. There were studies done to restart Raptor production but apparently the USAF went in a different direction and has created a new fighter in secret.
Politics certainly plays a huge role in these endeavors.
The problem was that restarting F-22 production would have been
absurdly expensive. Huge initial costs and several years to get everything back up and running, plus a lot of engineering and development time to replace and qualify equipment that is no longer available because the suppliers went out of business, the components aren’t made any more, etc. And that doesn’t even include having to re-learn all the processes and institutional knowledge that goes away when programs shut down and the people involved move on to other projects, retire, die off, etc.
Everyone thinks “but we have The Tooling, so we can build more!” but this isn’t 1950 and we’re not talking about homebuilts. There’s a whole lot more to producing advanced aircraft (civil or military) than just The Tooling, and besides, the advent of widespread CNC has resulted in a need for somewhat less tooling (in the traditional sense).
In the end I figured they could probably get at least 3 F-35s for the price of each new-build F-22, and have most of them in the air before the first new Raptor rolled off the line.
There are rumors that the F-22 successor has a prototype flying around but I strongly suspect it’s only a tech demonstrator at the X-32/X-35 level, if that. Hand-built airframe with scavenged systems, either an off-the-shelf or tech-demonstrator engine, and only vaguely similar in aerodynamics/appearance. No stealth coatings or detail features and no mission systems of any kind.