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'Not a Pretty Picture,' Expert Says of Trump Economy as Job Growth Grinds to a Halt
"It seems to me like we are looking at a labor market with near-zero labor force growth and near-zero real wage growth," wrote economist Dean Baker. "This means that real labor income in the economy is essentially flat."
Nov 12, 2025
Even without the benefit of recent federal jobs data, which the Trump administration has withheld amid the government shutdown, a prominent US economist argued Wednesday that it's clear the labor market under Donald Trump's leadership is increasingly grim.
Citing private figures that have been used to fill the void left by two consecutive missed jobs reports from the federal government, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research argued that "we can infer" weak job growth in September and suggested Trump or his aides "likely reviewed the September data and made a decision not to release it."
More broadly, Baker wrote, the payroll firm ADP "shows average private sector job growth of just 10,000 a month for the three months from July to October. Since this excludes the government sector, which likely shed jobs over this period due to federal layoffs (even pre-shutdown), the ADP data imply essentially zero job growth over this period."
"The other part of the story is that wage growth also seems to have slowed especially for workers at the bottom end of the wage distribution," Baker added. "It looks to me like we are looking at a labor market with near-zero labor force growth and near-zero real wage growth. This means that real labor income in the economy is essentially flat."
"That is not a pretty picture from the standpoint of the bulk of the population, and it does not describe a very stable path of economic growth," he continued. "When the AI bubble bursts, things might get really ugly really fast."
Baker's assessment came as CNN reported that President Donald Trump considered "traveling the country to give economy-focused speeches" as consumer sentiment craters, tariffs drive up prices, millions face skyrocketing health insurance premiums, and people across the country reel from the administration's assault on safety net programs.
Publicly, Trump has dismissed the notion that people are struggling economically under his administration, calling polling to that effect "fake."
"The economy's the strongest it's ever been," Trump falsely declared during a recent Fox News interview.
On Tuesday, the White House was widely mocked for citing extremely limited data from the food delivery company DoorDash to proclaim that Trump's agenda is "delivering real results for American families."
They’ve laid off so many people that the government is now getting its economic data from DoorDash.
[image or embed]
— Dare Obasanjo (@carnage4life.bsky.social) Nov 11, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Economist Paul Krugman wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that Trump is beginning to face "backlash against his attempts to gaslight the public about the true state of the economy," pointing to "the blowout Democratic victories in last week’s elections" as just part of that backlash.
"Once again, these attempts aren’t about putting a positive spin on the data. They’re just flat-out lies," Krugman wrote. "And Democrats should hammer those lies as proof not just that Trump is utterly dishonest, but that he’s completely out of touch with the reality of American life."
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Ethics Officials Ousted Amid Probe of Trump Ally's Access to Mortgage Files
The fired members of the Federal Housing Finance Agency's internal watchdog were looking into complaints that Director Bill Pulte and his team improperly pulled records of Democratic officials.
Nov 12, 2025
Watchdogs at the government-sponsored home loan company popularly known as Fannie Mae were fired as they investigated whether a close ally of President Donald Trump improperly accessed mortgage files of Democratic officials targeted for political retribution by the president, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
People familiar with the matter told the Journal that the fired ethics team members were looking into complaints that Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte and his team improperly directed staff to access mortgage records of New York Attorney General Letitia James and other Democratic officials.
The anonymous officials said that ethics team leader Suzanne Libby and her staffers were fired shortly after Fannie Mae management ordered them to stop investigating a company executive close to Pulte, effectively clearing out the company's internal watchdogs.
This, days after Reuters reported that Joe Allen, the FHFA's acting inspector-general, was being removed from his position. Three unnamed sources told Reuters that Allen's removal came as he was preparing to notify congressional lawmakers that the FHFA was not cooperating with his office.
Pulte has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a pro-Trump super political action committee and has been described as the president's "attack dog" after his team pulled property records of Democrats including James, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook.
James successfully sued Trump and his business organization for fraud. Schiff was the lead manager in the first of the president's two House impeachments.
Interim US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan—who was hand-picked by Trump—indicted James after her predecessor, Erik Seibert, refused to do so, citing a lack of evidence. On Tuesday, the Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog group, filed a complaint with the bar associations of Florida and Virginia accusing Halligan of possible ethics violations in connection with the charges against James and former FBI Director James Comey, who oversaw a probe into alleged pro-Trump interference in the 2016 presidential election by Russia.
Pulte said last month that he fired dozens of Fannie Mae staffers as part of the Trump administration's attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. On Monday, the company fired at least 200 additional employees, according to the Washington Post.
As the Post noted:
Pulte’s actions and unpredictable policymaking style have also sown uncertainty and undermined confidence in him from those across the housing finance industry at a crucial moment. The Trump administration is looking to take Fannie and Freddie [Mac]—under government control since the 2008 housing crisis—public through what it says would be the largest public offering in history. Pulling that off would require a full-throated endorsement from major banks, investors, lenders, and the financial markets. But multiple industry figures and housing finance experts say Pulte’s time in office, and the recent firings of top Fannie officials, is eroding their faith in the firms’ futures.
If Pulte or others are found to have improperly accessed mortgage records, they could possibly face charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits intentionally accessing electronic files without authorization or exceeding authorized access, especially for protected computers including those handling financial data at Fannie Mae.
News of the ethics team firings came as Fannie Mae is under scrutiny for announcing its lifting of the 620 minimum credit score requirement for borrowers seeking loans that will be sold to the company, and as Trump and Pulte float the possibility of 50-year residential mortgages. Critics point to the 2008-09 financial crash—caused largely by a real estate bubble fueled by risky lending practices—and the possibility of lifelong indebtedness resulting from such lengthy loans as cause for alarm.
Pulte is an heir to the fortune amassed by his grandfather, Pulte Homes founder William J. Pulte. The company, now known as PulteGroup, is currently the nation's third-largest homebuilder.
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Following ‘Lobbying Blitz,’ Senators Sneak Provision Killing Food Safety Rules Into Shutdown Bill
“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators,” said David Sirota, founder of The Lever.
Nov 12, 2025
While the Republican and Democratic senators who passed this week’s emergency funding bill to reopen the government took heat for their failure to provide a solution to rising health insurance premiums, they also slipped other provisions under the radar that will likely harm Americans’ health.
As The Lever reported Tuesday, senators inserted language into the bill that would gut food safety regulations that prevent illness and death, as well as regulations on ultraprocessed foods.
The changes come “amid a lobbying blitz and a flood of campaign cash” from the food and restaurant industries which have spent more than $13 million lobbying the White House, Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year.
Amid a surge of product recalls for bacteria like Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli, the number of dangerous cases of foodborne illness doubled last year, according to the Public Interest Network. These illnesses annually result in around 53,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Nevertheless, The Lever reports that the “new funding bill blocks federal rules designed to trace sources of outbreaks, and to prevent contamination of produce.” One provision bans the use of funds to administer or enforce the FDA’s "Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods," published in November 2022.
That traceability rule, The Lever notes, is “aimed to establish new record-keeping standards for companies to track their food products across the supply chain. Those records could help regulators identify the point of origin in the event of a major disease outbreak or food contamination event. The rule applied to produce, seafood, and certain dairy products, such as cheese, and exempted small businesses from the rule.”
The rule was initially proposed by the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, and enacted in 2023 by the Biden administration over aggressive opposition from industry groups. But after Trump’s return to office this year, they began a multimillion-dollar effort to lobby Congress to repeal the measure.
The National Restaurant Association spent nearly $2.5 million to lobby lawmakers to eliminate the rule, while the International Foodservice Distributors Association spent more than $600,000. In August, the Trump FDA proposed a rule to delay the traceability standards until 2028.
As The Lever explains: “The line inserted on page 154 of the new funding package contains identical language as the federal rule and would enshrine it into law.”
Two groups that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation of food tracking, the National Restaurant Association and the National Grocers Association, donated more than $750,000 to both parties’ congressional candidates and more than $145,000 to the two parties’ congressional election committees in the last election.
And they gave a combined $17,000 to three of the seven Democrats who joined Republicans in backing the bill—Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators who helped their campaign donors slip this language into their legislation to reopen the government,” wrote The Lever’s founder, David Sirota, on social media.
The traceability rule is one of several regulations the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote in the House on Wednesday, would gut. It also requires that none of the bill’s funds go toward enforcing a 2015 FDA rule requiring stricter inspections of wine grapes, hops, almonds, and certain other crops.
It also axes funds for the FDA to establish new regulations to limit the public’s high intake of sodium, which is commonly found in highly processed foods. The effort to gut these regulations notably flies in the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s so-called “Make America Healthy” initiative.
Kennedy’s “MAHA” report, released in May, explicitly called for guidelines “that emphasize unprocessed foods while strictly limiting high-fat, high-sugar, and high-sodium processed items.”
“The most MAGA thing ever is embracing the so-called MAHA movement and then quietly gutting food safety regulations and research into ultra-processed foods,” said Neal Kwatra, the founder of the New York-based progressive group Metropolitan Public Strategies. “Just previously unseen levels of gaslighting on politics vs. actual policy.”
But Democrats allowed the measure to pass, too. For this, Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blamed the overwhelming power of corporate money.
“As long as corporations and billionaires are legally allowed to pay off politicians, we will never have a government that works for us,” she said.
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