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jobs report
Jobs Report Offers 'Grim Warning Signs' for Cash-Strapped Working Families Under Trump
"Working Americans increasingly report that their paychecks can't keep up with Trump's high prices, but are not confident they’ll be able to find better opportunities," noted one Groundwork Collaborative expert.
Jul 02, 2026
As President Donald Trump's team on Thursday tried to paint the June jobs report as positive, economists and congressional Democrats called it "weak" and "disappointing," with some also ripping the Republican administration's harmful policies, from sweeping tariffs and the Iran War to the mass detention and deportation of immigrants.
The nation's economy added just 57,000 jobs in June, or roughly half of what economists had anticipated, according to the latest monthly report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS noted that "both the unemployment rate, at 4.2%, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, changed little in June."
The Department of Labor (DOL) agency also revised job gains down for May by 43,000 and April by 31,000, and said that "over the year, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.5%." That's notably lower than the 4.2% annual inflation rate detailed by BLS a few weeks ago, as Americans struggle to afford groceries, housing, and other basic necessities during Trump's second term.
"Today's weak jobs numbers are grim warning signs of a struggling labor market," Alex Jacquez, a former Obama administration official who is now Groundwork Collaborative's chief of policy and advocacy, said in a statement.
"Job gains reflect temporary seasonal hires and other workers separated from the broader economy while the majority of the labor force is frozen," he explained. "Working Americans increasingly report that their paychecks can't keep up with Trump's high prices, but are not confident they'll be able to find better opportunities. They're instead focused on trying to keep up with the president's price hikes."
Angela Hanks, a former DOL senior official who's now chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, similarly called the report "yet more evidence of a fragile economy under President Trump, with job growth coming in well below expectations and sizable downward revisions to the last two months."
"While the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 4.2%, this number only tells us how many people are working—it doesn't tell you whether people can afford to live," she stressed. "The reality behind today's jobs numbers is that the cost of living continues to outpace paychecks: 43% of Americans now say they're worse off financially than they were a year ago, and year-over-year wage growth came in at 3.5%, below overall inflation of 4.2%—meaning that real wages are falling."
"Looking beyond the topline numbers, more than half of all June job growth was concentrated in healthcare and social assistance, continuing a trend of these sectors propping up much of our economy," she pointed out. "The labor force participation rate declined sharply and widely, with nearly every demographic group seeing declines, which partially explains the drop in the unemployment rate. Moreover, certain racial and age disparities actually worsened: Black youth unemployment rate rose to a whopping 26.8%, as did Hispanic youth unemployment, coming in at 20.1%—a reminder that this economy is not delivering for workers who are struggling the most."
Hanks added that “while Trump will surely tout this moderate job growth as a win, not long ago numbers like today's would have prompted serious concern. But families aren't grading Trump on a curve: They feel the impacts of this administration's chaotic and costly economic policies every day. Until working people can actually afford their lives—groceries, housing, healthcare, childcare—claims of a 'strong economy' will continue to ring hollow."
In line with Hanks' prediction, Trump's messengers attempted to frame the figures positively, with his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, celebrating the declining foreign-born labor force amid the administration's deadly crackdown on immigrants, and her deputy, Kush Desai, claiming the report "reinforces that the American labor market remains solid."
Acting Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling—whom the president earlier this week nominated for the permanent post—said that "Trump's America first agenda continues to provide greater wages for workers and certainty to the sectors which will fuel the next 250 years of US economic security."
Meanwhile, with the midterm elections just four months away, the Democratic National Committee's rapid response director, Kendall Witmer, declared that "Donald Trump's failed economic agenda has driven working families into a corner as Americans worry about how to find a job and keep up with sky-high prices. The reality for working families is undeniable: Trump has wrecked the economy, leaving millions wondering how they will make ends meet with no relief in sight."
"But Trump doesn't give a shit—he's only focused on building his vanity projects and using the power of the presidency to get even richer," added Witmer, just two days after the president's annual financial disclosures revealed that he pocketed an unprecedented $2.2 billion—over half of it from his family’s cryptocurrency grift—during his first year back in the Oval Office.
Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) took to social media over "another disappointing jobs report" and also called out GOP priorities, from erecting a giant arch in Trump's honor to putting his name on various items, including passports and the $250 bill.
As Lieu concluded, "November is coming."
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No, Says Economist, March US Jobs Report 'Is Not Good'
"The latest jobs data show how President Trump's mismanagement of the economy—both domestically and internationally—is harming workers at home," said another expert.
Apr 03, 2026
As US Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on Friday declared that "America's economic comeback is on full display" and the country's "workers are winning again" due to what the business press and top newspapers called a "strong" March jobs report, some economists stressed the importance of looking beyond the topline figure and one month of data.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that employers added 178,000 jobs last month, with gains in construction, healthcare, and transportation and warehousing, and declines in the federal government. The unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.3%, with 7.2 million people officially jobless.
"Folks, today's jobs report is not good," declared Heidi Shierholz, president of the think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI). She pointed to average job growth over the past two months, the reason for the drop in unemployment ("people leaving the labor force"), slowing wage growth, and the fact that "the effects of our war in Iran aren't even in these numbers yet."
EPI senior economist Elise Gould further explained those points on social media. Although the report "came in stronger than expected... much of the gain was a bounce back to February declines (now a loss of 133,000 jobs)," she said. "As a result, average monthly growth the last two months was only 22,500 jobs."
As far as the unemployment rate ticking down, "it's important to note that this happened for the 'wrong' reasons as both the labor force participation and the share of the population with a job also ticked down," Gould continued. "Job gains were strongest in healthcare as striking workers returned to work."
"Attacks on the federal workforce continue," she highlighted, with the sector down 18,000 jobs in March and 352,000 positions since January 2025, when President Donald returned to power. "The vital services federal employees provide cannot be done without these essential workers. The cost of these losses are only just beginning."
"Manufacturing rose 15,000 jobs in March, but still has a huge deficit since Trump took office. Since January 2025, the manufacturing sector has lost 82,000 jobs," the economist noted. "Wage growth has been slowing for the last few months, particularly driven by slower growth for production and nonsupervisory workers, roughly the lower 82% of the workforce."
Gould added that "we don't have the inflation data yet to show real wage changes in March, but slowing nominal wage growth coupled with rising prices from the Iran war almost surely means real wages will suffer, contributing to worsening affordability."
Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran at the end of February, and the new data is from the middle of March, so "the impact of the war and higher fuel prices will be limited" in this report, as Center for Economic and Policy Research co-founder Dean Baker acknowledged. "April could look considerably worse."
Breyon Williams, chief economist at another think tank, Groundwork Collaborative, said that "beyond today's headline bounce, the labor market continues to deteriorate under Trump's economic mismanagement: Hiring has ground to a halt, paychecks are shrinking, and workers are giving up on finding a job altogether. A single month of modest gains can't reverse the damage that the president has inflicted on working families."
A former senior Labor Department official who's now chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, Angela Hanks, similarly asserted that "the latest jobs data show how President Trump's mismanagement of the economy—both domestically and internationally—is harming workers at home."
"While the topline rate does not yet reflect the war's impact on the job market, wage growth has stalled, and oil prices are skyrocketing, resulting in higher prices for consumers and threatening to weaken the job market," she noted. Specifically, according to a Thursday report from Democratic members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee, Americans spent an extra $8.4 billion at the gas pump in the first month of Trump's war.
"Families are already under tremendous pressure from rising prices, slowing job growth, and mounting debt as they struggle to make ends meet, and not seeing help on the way," said Hanks. "Families and workers across the country deserve leadership that puts them first and works to make living a fulfilling life affordable for everyone. Instead, they're stuck with leaders in Washington more focused on needless and damaging wars and slashing the safety net to pay for them."
After passing a 2025 budget package that gave the rich more tax breaks by slashing over $1 trillion from the safety net, including food assistance and Medicaid—which is expected to leave millions of Americans without health insurance—congressional Republicans are considering more healthcare cuts to fund Trump's war. The Pentagon has asked for at least $200 billion for Iran, and more broadly, the president wants an unprecedented $1.5 trillion in military spending for the next fiscal year.
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'Dismal' Employment Report Shows Trump Economy Lost 92,000 Jobs in February
“Month after month, the data shows Donald Trump’s economy is failing American families.”
Mar 06, 2026
President Donald Trump's self-proclaimed "greatest" economy in history took another major blow on Friday as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that the American economy lost 92,000 jobs in February.
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, described the report as "dismal," while noting that the US economy as a whole has actually lost jobs since Trump announced his "liberation day" global tariffs in April 2025.
"Total job gains since from May 2025 to February 2026 are now -19,000," she wrote. "Companies are not hiring in the face of all of these headwinds and uncertainty. And even healthcare is starting to slow down."
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers argued that "the economic story just changed dramatically" because of the jobs report, which also showed downward revisions to the estimated jobs created in December and January.
"Recession questions are back on the menu," he said.
Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project, zeroed in on the surprise loss of healthcare jobs in February as particularly concerning given that healthcare has been the lone industry to consistently add jobs in recent months.
"This is the first month in years where healthcare jobs went negative, really changing the dynamic," he said. "Cuts to Medicaid, cuts to ACA... suddenly the thing that was 187% of private jobs since liberation day, holding it together, may be giving out?"
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, said that the terrible jobs report was a direct reflection of Trump's economic mismanagement.
"Month after month, the data shows Donald Trump’s economy is failing American families," Boyle said. "The job market is weakening, costs remain high, and Trump’s illegal tariff taxes continue to hurt businesses and workers. Trump and his allies in Congress know their agenda isn’t working. Instead of helping working families, they are pushing more tariff taxes and more tax breaks for billionaires. It is clear Republicans in Washington simply do not care about working families."
Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, declared that "the deterioration in the labor market is visible from space," and pinned the blame on "Trump’s reckless economic agenda."
"As the president piles on blanket tariffs and oil prices soar," Jacquez said, "today's report confirms he's sent the economy straight into a stagflation spiral."
University of Pennsylvania economist Heather Boushey said weakness in the US economy had been evident for several months, although Friday's jobs report showed the largest job losses of any month during Trump's second term.
"Today's data should not come as a shock as there have been signs of weakening in the US labor market for quite some time," she said. "The Trump administration’s focus on undermining the US economy rather than investing in America may be coming home to roost."
Daniel Hornung, policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said that the bad jobs report will make things even harder for the US Federal Reserve when it comes to making interest rate cut decisions.
"This morning’s report... comes at a difficult moment, with inflation still above target and an oil price shock threatening to raise inflation further," Hornung said. "The report complicates the Fed’s efforts to keep both unemployment and inflation low, and it makes it difficult for the [Trump] administration to argue heading into the midterms that their policies are leading to the kind of growth or improvement in living standards that they’ve long promised."
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Weak US Jobs Report Shows 'Bleak Economic Reality' for Workers Under Trump
There has been "almost no hiring since April," observed one economist.
Jan 09, 2026
The US labor market appears to be running on fumes under President Donald Trump, as the latest jobs report revealed that the American economy added just 50,000 jobs in December, below economists' consensus estimate of 55,000 jobs.
The report, released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), also found that the US economy as a whole created just 584,000 jobs in 2025, which is less than a third of the 2 million jobs created in 2024 during the last year of former President Joe Biden's term.
The 2025 figure also marked the lowest number of annual jobs created since 2020, when the economy was shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone couldn't put a happy spin on the jobs report after its release, as she noted that the gains of just 37,000 private-sector jobs on the month were "much weaker than expected."
"Private sector payrolls coming in much weaker than expected" -- Maria Bartiromo and company cope with an underwhelming December jobs report (wait for Stephen Moore's bonkers commentary at the end) pic.twitter.com/C5D8qu5h8f
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2026
Digging further into the report, Bloomberg economic analyst Joe Weisenthal observed on X that manufacturing employment has been hit particularly hard in recent months, despite Trump's vow that his tariffs would lead to a manufacturing revival in the US.
"It's not just that total manufacturing employment is shrinking," he explained. "The number of manufacturing sub-sectors that are adding jobs is rapidly shrinking. Of the 72 different types of manufacturing tracked by the BLS, just 38.2% are still adding jobs. A year ago it was 47.2%."
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted that the weakness in the labor market extends beyond the manufacturing sector, as there has been "almost no hiring outside of healthcare and hospitality" since the start of Trump's second term.
Richardson also observed that "there was almost no hiring since April" of last year, when Trump announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs that sent shockwaves through the global economy.
Economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, zeroed in on downward revisions in prior jobs reports, reinforcing that the current labor market is anemic.
"With the revisions, the average for the last three months was a fall of 22,000 [jobs]," Baker explained. "The healthcare and social assistance sector added an average of 49,000 jobs over this period, which means that outside of healthcare the economy lost an average of 71,000 jobs in the last three months."
Alex Jacquez, chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, said the jobs report reflected a "lifeless economy," and he pinned the blame on Trump and his trade policies as a top reason.
"Working families face sluggish wage growth, fewer job opportunities, and never-ending price hikes on groceries, household essentials, and utilities," said Jacquez. "Despite the president's endless attempts to deflect and distract from the bleak economic reality, workers and job seekers know their budgets feel tighter than ever thanks to Trump’s disastrous economic mismanagement."
Economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute took a look at the jobs numbers and concluded the US labor market now is far weaker than the one Biden left Trump nearly one year ago.
"The slowdown in job growth this year is stark compared to 2024," Gould wrote on Bluesky. "The average monthly gain was only 49,000 in 2025 compared to 168,000 in 2024. Over the last three months, average job growth was actually negative, meaning there are fewer jobs now than in September."
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the Navy Federal Credit Union's chief economist. That error has been corrected.
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Don’t Put a Social Security Hater in Charge of Our Economic Data
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics that help determine crucial benefits.
Aug 13, 2025
On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated EJ Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS. The nomination came 10 days after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, baselessly accusing her of having “rigged” the July jobs report, which showed a slowing labor market and contained large downward revisions to payroll employment for the previous two months. Antoni, in line with Trump’s false assertions of fraud, has proposed halting the monthly jobs report entirely.
Antoni is not the sort of figure you want at the helm of a statistical agency. He has a long history of egregiously misrepresenting BLS data or, perhaps worse, misunderstanding it in extremely basic ways. He has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and said that we “need to sunset the program.” His nomination has been panned by figures across the political spectrum. Stan Veuger of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, for instance, minced no words in his statement to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”
The partisan transformation of BLS holds untold dangers, given that BLS data is baked into our economic policy. Policymakers look at the rates of unemployment and inflation when setting policy, of course, but by law, several BLS data series also provide for the automatic adjustment of social insurance programs and welfare benefits. Juking the stats could harm the massive number of people that make use of these programs.
How Inflation Data Affects Your Income
The most obvious way that BLS data affects our safety net is through the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) afforded to retirees on Social Security—an annual benefit boost meant to keep up with inflation. The COLA is calculated using BLS’ Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), and in addition to retirees, people on Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income, and Veterans Disability Compensation receive COLAs. For many of the people on these programs, the benefits make up a significant chunk of their income. Roughly 40% of Social Security recipients receive more than 50% of their income from the program, for instance.
CPI data affects a number of other benefit programs as well. The Department of Agriculture uses CPI data to determine the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan, which is in turn used to calculate benefit allotments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. The Department of Housing and Urban Development uses CPI data in the calculation of Fair Market Rents, a metric which determines the benefit amount for housing vouchers, among other applications. Eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is tied to the federal poverty level, which the Department of Health and Human Services updates annually using CPI data.
If Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
In all, according to the Bureau, “The CPI affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action.” In other words, one-third of Americans have a source of income whose relationship to BLS data is written in the law. Virtually all of us will at some point in our lives receive benefits for which this is the case—assuming that Antoni is unsuccessful in sunsetting Social Security. The relationship between the CPI and your income also extends beyond public benefits: It is widely used in employment contracts, for example, for workers’ annual cost-of-living raises (especially in unionized workplaces).
Manipulating the stats is easier said than done, but if Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.
How Jobs Data Affects Your Ability to Access Unemployment Insurance
In several states, the duration of state-level unemployment insurance benefits varies according to the state’s unemployment rate (recall that Trump fired Commissioner McEntarfer over the jobs numbers). In Florida and Georgia, residents are currently capped at 12 weeks of unemployment insurance based on their low unemployment rates (the standard in other states is 26 weeks). In April, Massachusetts extended the maximum duration of unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to 30 weeks based on its statutory trigger: that one of its metro areas had an unemployment rate greater than 5.1%. To make that determination, it used BLS’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
At the federal level, we also have an extended benefits program, which provides 13 additional weeks of unemployment insurance to workers in states dealing with high unemployment. States are required to use an “insured unemployment rate” trigger, which turns “on” when a large portion of workers within the state are receiving unemployment insurance—calculated by states using the BLS’ Quarterly Census of Earnings and Wages. States can also adopt various optional triggers, all of which use BLS data in some way.
(BLS data serves as an input into much more than I am able to specify here. If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the BLS’ Handbook of Methods. Pick a subject area, then a survey, then navigate to the “presentation” tab, where BLS often cites examples of how the data you have selected tends to be used—by researchers, agencies, the private sector, and more.)
EJ Antoni Doesn’t Care About Your Income; He Cares About Keeping Trump Happy
With the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead BLS, there is reason to be fearful of the Trump administration massaging or outright falsifying key economic statistics. Antoni cannot be trusted to run the BLS as an independent, nonpartisan body, and we should watch the data accordingly. If Antoni can rig things to make the economy look better for Trump, bad data will feed into a system that takes these estimates at face value. Inflation is low, says Trump, so your COLA is low. Unemployment is low, says Trump, so you can’t remain on unemployment insurance.
Antoni certainly doesn’t seem to care if you lose out on some of the benefits you are duly owed. In a 2018 article co-written with Stephen Moore, Antoni said that “the cost of welfare” is “disgusting” and advocated for the government to “moderately and slowly cut benefits so that, over time, some programs can be eliminated.” (They declined to say which programs.)
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself.
The BLS is also already struggling in ways that Antoni is likely to make worse. Trump’s hiring freeze has impeded the agency’s data collection efforts, as BLS and the Census Bureau, which collects the data for many of BLS’ surveys, have both lost many staffers. As a result, BLS has reduced data collection for the CPI substantially in recent months, and it has discontinued some 350 indexes in the Producer Price Index. This decline in data quality poses its own threat to our economic data, apart from Trump’s desire to see good numbers.
Antoni, for his part, has praised the Department of Government Efficiency’s mass firings of civil servants and in November advocated for DOGE to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” Those comments suggest he’ll be disinclined to address—or even acknowledge—the understaffing problem.
Much of the law governing our safety net depends on assumptions that Trump has brought into question: that our economic data is sound, and that the civil servants producing it are impartial, rigorous, and dedicated to the data itself. If EJ Antoni is confirmed as BLS Commissioner, we will all have one more reason to fear for our economic security.
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Trump’s Firing of the BLS Commissioner Is Part of a Larger Attack on Government Data
An alarming approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
Aug 07, 2025
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, in retaliation for publishing weak jobs numbers in the bureau’s monthly employment report. The Trump administration rightly received criticism for spooking investors and undermining the creditability of government data for this reckless move. But this is just the latest act in a broader erosion of the federal data infrastructure.
President Trump provided zero evidence to support his claim of a “rigged” report created to make him look bad. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, described the firing as “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It’s crucial to understand the BLS is an independent, non-partisan, and highly respected agency tasked with producing data on jobs, wages, and prices. This data serves as the backbone for a broad swath of public and private decision-making. Researchers depend on these data to study the impacts of government decision-making on the economy, budgets, and people’s lives.
Trump’s latest attack on the BLS contributes to an alarming trend. For years, federal statistical agencies have been chronically underfunded. Under the Trump administration, additional budget cuts, federal hiring freezes, and mass layoffs are further straining agencies.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go.
The collection of quality data is often labor-intensive, sometimes requiring massive field operations. When agency funding and staff levels cannot support the full collection effort, we risk losing the kind of data that is the hardest, and most essential, to collect: data in rural areas, smaller geographies, and often historically undercounted populations. This kind of slow data erasure poses serious challenges for tax policy research and modeling.
For example, the Census Bureau employs thousands of field representatives to interview households and businesses for a range of surveys. But since January, 1,300 Census Bureau employees have reportedly left, further hamstringing data collection in an already understaffed agency. Previously, when the agency faced funding shortfalls in 2016, it cancelled its field testing aimed at improving counts in Spanish-speaking areas and on Indigenous reservations for the 2020 Census. These hard-to-count communities are often central to our analyses of tax equity.
BLS faces similar challenges. Inflation data relies on data collectors to record price data from thousands of retailers across the country. These operations are being forced to scale back due to shrinking resources and in some cases have stopped altogether. Despite this, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal reduces the BLS budget by $56 million and proposes a major restructuring of the agency. This data is foundational to many aspects of modeling; it allows us to compare the impact of policy over time in “real” terms and project policy impacts out into the future.
At the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), staffing levels in the Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics office have decreased by 29% since January. As a result, the IRS has indefinitely postponed its Joint Statistical Research Program, which produced original research and novel data sets that the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy frequently relies on to inform our own modeling of tax policy and taxpayer behavior.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go. At the height of Covid-19 deaths in June 2020, Trump famously said, “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases if any.” A similar approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
The federal government’s statistical agencies are full of nonpartisan career economists and statisticians who work hard to be responsible stewards of our nation’s data. And they continue to do so even under tight resource constraints and amid a fiercely partisan political environment. But last week’s attacks on BLS fuel growing fears among researchers and policy analysts that the data we rely on to understand policy may one day be compromised, suppressed, or deleted altogether.
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'Living in a Fantasy World': Critics Pounce as Trump's CNBC Interview Goes Off the Rails
"The racism here is on steroids," said one critic about Trump's statements on immigrant farmworkers.
Aug 05, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump gave a lengthy interview to CNBC on Tuesday and critics quickly pounced on the president for telling a large number of false claims on topics ranging from monthly jobs numbers to the price of gas to international trade agreements.
Toward the start of the interview, CNBC host Joe Kernen pushed back on Trump's claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had "rigged" job creation numbers against him and debunked a Trump statement that the BLS had covered up negative jobs data revisions under the Biden administration until after the November 2024 presidential election.
Trump, however, insisted that his statements about hiding downward revisions until after the election were correct even though the biggest downward revisions actually occurred in August 2024, well before the election took place.
Trump is on CNBC making a case that jobs numbers are rigged -- even as MAGA-friendly host Joe Kernen tries to push back pic.twitter.com/9jAkiCDI8h
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
Commenting on Trump's assertion, Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz described it as "completely backwards."
"The BLS announcement on November 1 [2024] showed weak growth of 12,000 jobs in October and downward revisions to August/September of 112,000," Gertz explained on X. "Then after the election, the October figure was revised upward. Impossible to tell if Trump is lying, dumb, or sundowning."
Nick Tiriamos, the chief economics correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, similarly said that Trump was "getting his dates wrong" when he asserted a cover-up of negative jobs numbers given that "the big downward revision" was reported before the election took place.
Trump also made also false claims about the price of gas in the United States falling to just $2.20 per gallon, which prompted Kernen to note that the lowest prices he's seen for gas in the U.S. were $2.80 per gallon.
TRUMP: Joe, looking at energy. Energy is down $2.20 cents a barre-- a gallon for a car
KERNEN: I've seen $2.80 pic.twitter.com/6GIfGG5JJf
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
National security attorney Bradley Moss slammed Trump for his claim about gas prices and added that the latest data show that inflation has been accelerating in recent months as the president's tariffs begin to force companies to raise prices.
"The rest of the country is suffering from higher prices on everything, and this senile old man is living in a fantasy world in which it's simply not happening," he wrote on Bluesky.
Trump proceeded to make false claims about the trade deal he had recently struck with the European Union when he said that the agreement gave him "$600 billion to invest in anything I want." This drew the ire of Steve Peers, a professor of E.U. and human rights law at Royal Holloway University of London.
"Well no, it's a vague, nonbinding, unwritten nonstatement about companies' future investment plans, not cash for him to personally control," Peers commented on Bluesky. "But enjoy your weird demented fantasy, I guess."
Another eye-popping Trump statement came when he tried to defend the use of immigrant labor in the American agricultural industry by claiming that the immigrants had unique physical attributes that were absent from American workers.
"People that live in the inner city are not doing that work," Trump said of the prospects of American citizens picking crops. "They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. They don't do it. These people [immigrants] do it naturally. Naturally... they don't get a bad back, because if they get a bad back, they die."
Trump on undocumented farm workers: "People that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They've tried, we've tried, everybody tried. They don't do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally ... they don't get a bad back, because if they get a bad back, they die." pic.twitter.com/HxXtKtIPLa
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
This statement drew the attention of Branden McEuen, a historian at Wayne State University who specializes in teaching about the history of the eugenics movement. Specifically, McEuen linked Trump's statement to past racist beliefs about people of color being genetically predisposed to engage in manual labor.
"Trump saying people of color are naturally suited to farm labor sure sounds a lot like the slaveholders that said slaves were naturally inclined to servitude," he remarked.
SiriusXM radio host Michelangelo Signorile picked up a similar vibe from Trump's statement about farmworkers.
"The racism here is on steroids, as Trump tried to make [the] case to MAGA that farmers need exemptions," he wrote. "[Trump] says brown people do hard labor 'naturally' and don't get [a] bad back, while also saying they've tried to replace them with people 'in the inner city' but they can't get them to do the work."
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Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.
Aug 02, 2025
I spent much of the 1990s as U.S. secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.
So what does President Donald Trump do? With one fell swoop Friday he destroyed the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else—presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.
Trump is in the process of trying to do the same thing with the Federal Reserve—demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell give in to Trump? It loses it. In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation, as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.
Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency. It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of Indigenous people. He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.
This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
This is what fascism looks like, friends.
We must fight this with everything we have.
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'Banana Republic': Experts Horrified as Trump Demands BLS Director's Firing Over Bad Jobs Report
One economist mused that the president's economic advisers could make "a picture book" so they can "explain to Trump how the data are collected."
Aug 01, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump stunned economics experts on Friday when he demanded the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the current commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In justifying his call to fire McEntarfer, Trump baselessly accused her of manipulating economic data to hurt him politically by releasing a report showing that the economy only added 73,000 jobs last month.
"McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months," the president wrote on his Truth Social platform. "Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative."
Trump also accused a Federal Reserve committee of conspiring to help former Vice President Kamala Harris beat him last November, writing, "The Economy is BOOMING under 'TRUMP' despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting 'Kamala' elected."
Trump's angry rant about the purportedly rigged jobs report set off alarms among many economists who said that the president's actions would badly damage the credibility of any future numbers put out by the BLS and other agencies.
"Trump firing the BLS director for a bad jobs report—days after demanding the Smithsonian remove him from the list of impeached presidents—is banana republic stuff," remarked Jessica Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank. "Trump just ensured that we should not trust any government data coming out of his administration. Why should we trust data from agencies in which the director's job depends on altering any bad economic news?"
Harvard University economist Jason Furman warned that Trump could be setting the stage for a major crisis if his administration really starts faking economic data.
"This is awful," he wrote on Bluesky. "Reliable economic data is a key strength of the U.S. economy. When Argentina and Greece faked economic data it contributed to major crises. I don't think Trump will be able to fake the data given the procedures. But there is now a risk plus an awful appearance."
Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, similarly emphasized how important it is that U.S. businesses have access to accurate economic data to make informed decisions.
"By incorrectly asserting that the data are biased, President Trump is undermining the integrity of the information that policymakers, businesses, households, and investors use to make important decisions that affect the welfare of the nation," he warned. "It is imperative that decision-makers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality. By casting doubt on that, the president is damaging the United States."
Dean Baker, an economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research, questioned whether Trump's directive to his team to fire was a fresh sign of mental decline.
"I was thinking that someone on Trump's economic team could explain to him how the data are compiled, but I realize that they can't even explain to him that his big beautiful tariffs are taxes on us," he joked. "I guess in his current mental condition, Trump just can't learn anything new."
Baker then mused that the president's economic advisers could make "a picture book" so they can "explain to Trump how the data are collected."
Some Democratic politicians were also quick to hammer Trump for his call to fire McEntarfer simply for reporting disappointing jobs numbers.
"Instead of helping people get good jobs, Donald Trump just fired the statistician who reported bad jobs data that the wannabe king doesn't like," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) accused Trump of "trying to cook the books by firing the non-political career civil servant who oversees the data, because he wants to hide the truth of his failed policies from the American people."
And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that Trump's attack on McEntarfer was a classic sign of failed leadership.
"What does a bad leader do when they get bad news? Shoot the messenger," he said.
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'Very Significant Sign of Weakening': Bad Jobs Report Sets Off Alarms About US Economy Under Trump
"Hard to overstate how bad this jobs report was," commented one market analyst.
Aug 01, 2025
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday showed a significant slowdown in hiring across the economy.
In total, the BLS estimated that a mere 73,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in July, which was well below economists' consensus estimate of 117,500 net job gains.
What really made the latest jobs report concerning, however, was the downward revision of previous months' gains, which the BLS described as "larger than normal." The number of jobs added in May was revised downward from 144,000 to 19,000, while the number of jobs added in June was revised downward from 147,000 to 14,000. Taken together, this means that the economy has added an average of just 35,000 jobs per month over the last three months.
New York Times chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman described the downward revisions as "a very significant sign of weakening" and he noted that healthcare and social assistance jobs accounted for nearly all of last month's gains.
"If it hadn't been for that sector, employment would have fallen slightly," he observed on Bluesky.
Economic analyst Joe Weisenthal, cohost of the Bloomberg podcast "Odd Lots," also zeroed in on the fact that healthcare and social assistance were now carrying the weight for the entire U.S. labor market.
"Brutal," he wrote on X. "If you exclude these two categories, job growth has been running negative for three straight months."
Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, described the July jobs report as a "game changer," and not in a good way.
"The labor market now looks a lot weaker than expected," Long wrote on X. "This puts a September rate cut from the Federal Reserve back on the table."
Market analyst Adam Crisafulli, the founder of Vital Knowledge Media, shared Long's view that the Federal Reserve would likely start cutting rates soon and he even believed that the Fed would have cut rates starting this week had it known about the weakness of the labor market.
"Hard to overstate how bad this jobs report was," he commented on X.
Daniel Hornung, a senior fellow at MIT and former deputy director of the National Economic Council, said that the weak jobs report will only make the Federal Reserve's decisions more perilous in the coming months.
"A turbulent week in markets and the economy is coming to a close with inflation moving higher, while economic and payroll growth are moving lower," he said. "It's a precarious position for the Fed and the economy, largely the result of the [Trump] administration's stagflationary tariff policies, which are set to move even higher beginning next week."
Jessica Fulton, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, argued that the slowdown in hiring, combined with the increased costs consumers are facing thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs, are putting American workers in a very tight squeeze.
"The economy continues to show signs of weakening even as the White House pushes policies that will raise costs and make it harder for families to make ends meet," she said. "Labor market cracks that showed up for Black women earlier this year are beginning to expand, with Black male unemployment reaching 7% this month. Black workers are often laid off first when the economy slows down."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, delivered a blistering statement about the jobs report and pointed the finger directly at Trump and Republicans in Congress.
"Under President Trump, job growth is slowing, costs keep rising, and the Big Ugly Law is stripping health care from millions," he said. "While he hands out tax breaks to billionaires and stokes reckless trade wars, middle-class families are left paying the price."
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