Jobs in Turbulent Times

Have recent government layoffs registered in national unemployment rates? Have the official rate and NJFAN’s amplified estimate for real unemployment risen because of the Trump administration’s assault on government workers? We’ll examine those questions and also ask whether we may be headed for a recession as a result, in part, of the president’s unpredictable and ill-conceived economic policies.

The short answer to the first question about government layoffs is that the general numbers don’t show much evidence of the Trump and Musk layoffs. Official unemployment was 4.2% in March, April, and May. The number of unemployed in these months was 7.1 million, 7.2 million, and 7.2 million. It’s hard to believe that those numbers were essentially the same over those three months, but other important numbers have also not changed much yet. Most of the rates for specific social groups have thus far been pretty stable. For example, the government’s unemployment rate for black Americans over three months was 6.2%, 6.3% and 6%.  

The National Jobs for All Network’s (NJFAN)’s amplified estimate of the real unemployment rate hardly changed at all. These rates were 10.1%, 10%, 10.1% in March, April, and May. So not much difference here either. But those high rates are a symptom of the long-term failure of national employment policy.

The steadiness of some of these numbers is a little surprising in light of the fact that thousands of government workers have been fired. These job losses have registered in some of the statistics. The total number of Federal employees declined from last December through this May by 56,000. This number includes the loss in the Postal Service of 6,400 positions. The disappearance of Federal positions is especially grim because Federal jobs tend to come with better pay and benefits than private-sector positions. And the loss of these jobs is also terrible because it was carried out with malevolence and incompetence.

Omens of Recession?  Many Numbers to Consider

• Four-week averages of initial unemployment insurance claims are up by about 10% since January. But there is no long-term negative trend yet.  
• In recent months (January-April), job openings in the private sector have fallen by 300,000, but the total number of openings is still 6.5 million. And there has been almost one job opening per unemployed person (in the official rate) since February of 2024. It would be much better for workers if there were two jobs for every officially unemployed person because there are more truly jobless people than the government counts. But things have not gotten worse in recent months. In fact, in every one of the last 15 months, the number of job openings has matched the number of (officially) unemployed people looking for work.
• A long-term plus, if you ignore hidden unemployment, is that with the exception of the pandemic period from April 2020 through October 2021, the official unemployment rate has not once been over 4.2% between October 2017 and May 2025. If you are a mainstream economist, I’d think you’d be happy about that. While we at NJFAN believe the official rates are incomplete, they are nonetheless low and not rising. They are not signaling that a recession is near. But there may be other signs.
• Normally, more quits mean that workers are optimistic about finding other jobs. Are there fewer workers quitting their jobs? If we leave aside the pandemic era and compare quits for 2024-2025 to those of another normal period, 2018-2019, we find that monthly quits in 2024-2025 are often around 2.1% while in 2018-2019, quits were often about 2.3%. Is that difference significant? I am not sure. In the United States there are three to four million quits a month. The difference between a 2.1% and a 2.3% rate (as a percentage of total employment) could be in the range of 300,000 to 400,000 people. That’s a pretty large number. Does it show that some workers today are more fearful of having to look for new jobs if they leave the jobs they have? Perhaps a little.
• Are hiring rates down? Yahoo writer Josh Schafer and Fed chair Jerome Powell think so. What are the facts? Again, if we omit from our comparisons that crazy period of the pandemic, we learn that current hiring rates (as a percentage of existing total employment) are a little below the averages of 2015-2019. In the past 24 months, hiring rates have often been around 3.5%. Over 2015-2019, they were often around 3.8%. That difference does not seem to be a big one, but it means roughly 400,000 fewer hires a month in the recent period. (A side note. There may be something wrong with some of the latest numbers for the civilian labor force. The category of the civilian labor force includes employed workers and those searching for work. In April the number jumped up by 544,000. In May it fell by 625,000. (These numbers are supposed to be seasonally adjusted.))
• Job openings in the Federal government have been steady at about 130,000, despite the well-publicized layoffs. The total number of Federal employees is large at 2,596,000. By one method of counting, private-sector employment is about 135,000,000. The miseries of several hundred thousand laid-off Federal workers show up in some of the unemployment numbers, but they don’t have a huge impact on the general national numbers. Even a largeish number of added unemployed federal workers—say 300,000—might only lift the overall unemployment rate from 4.2% to about 4.4%.
• Another negative: It’s gotten a little harder for recent college grads to find work. There is more caution and less hiring at big tech companies and other large concerns. The unemployment rate for recent grads is usually lower than the overall national unemployment rate, but it is now higher at 5.3%.
• Truly worrisome is that the monthly increase in non-farm jobs has fallen over the last three years. Average monthly increases in 2023, 2024, and 2025 were 216,166, 167,667, and 123,800. Non-farm employment increased by 2,594,000 over the whole of 2023 but it is on track to increase by only 1,485,000 in 2025. That is a very large difference. (For these numbers I used the seasonally adjusted BLS Establishment monthly numbers at CES0000000001.) (For these numbers I used the seasonally adjusted BLS Establishment monthly numbers at CES0000000001.)
• On June 10, The World Bank predicted that the U.S. economy would grow half as fast this year as last year—1.4% rather than 2.8%. The bank’s chief economist also seemed to suggest that the world might need a recession to tame inflation. Is he worried about the long-range impact of Trump’s policies on prices? Consumer prices increased by 2.4% over the last 12 months and only 0.1% last month. Does that really indicate the need for harsh medicine?

Employment Policy Without Empathy or Organizational Common Sense

            Some of the tens of thousands of workers who were fired by Trump and Musk are no longer looking for new jobs. They are returning to their government workplaces or they may soon be asked to do so. Trump and Musk fired many people and often without any thought about the work that they were doing. It turns out that many fired workers had valuable skills and experience and were performing necessary jobs. Who knew?

            Here are examples of efforts to destroy government jobs and useful services, and then, sometimes, to re-hire the ejected workers.

• The Agriculture Department rushed to hire back workers who knew something about bird flu after influenza sent egg prices up.
• The FDA kicked out thousands of employees, many of whom were, within weeks, asked to return.
• About a fifth of the workers in the Nuclear Safety Department were fired, thus risking the security of 5,000 nuclear warheads.
• A spokesperson in Health and Human Services said that the firings were just a restructuring in order to better serve the American people. So everything is fine.
• The National Weather Service is understaffed. DOGE agents laid off probationary workers and pushed other people to accept early retirement, without concern for the jobs they were doing.
• At Housing and Urban Development, 2,300 employees were pushed out or resigned.

            Some of these workers were called back within weeks of losing their jobs. Some are reluctant to return to toxic workplaces. In some cases, managers lied and claimed to be firing employees for poor performance. The lives of thousands of workers were made a misery, out of ignorance and a determined policy of callousness toward employees and those whom they served. In some agencies there have been no retractions. The worst case is the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is completely gone.

Frank Stricker is on the board of the National Jobs for All Network and writes for NJFAN and Dollars & Sense. In 2020 he published a book called American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future (2020). He taught History and Labor Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, for 37 years.

Acknowledgements: As always, there are many writers and researchers whose labor has been essential to my essay. They did much of the hard work of getting the stuff. I tried to put it together in new ways. I really am thankful for many writers at the New York Times, including Ben Casselman, Joe Rennison, and Colby Smith. Also, AP writer Paul Wiseman whose work appears in The Los Angeles Times. And Yahoo writer Josh Schafer and Paul Davidson at USA Today. And Hannah Natanson and her co-workers at the Washington Post who dug up so much important information about the efforts of the Trump administration to undo some of the initial DOGE firings.