Where Have All the New Jobs Gone?

The U.S. economy continues to grow, at least for now. But job creation has come to a near halt. 

That got the attention of Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell. In late September, he told the Providence, Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce that, “In the labor market, there has been a marked slowing in both the supply of and demand for workers—an unusual and challenging development.” 

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration has stunted the growth of the labor force and slowed the supply of workers. But what explains employers’ reluctance to create new jobs in an expanding economy, thus slowing the demand for workers? Is the creation of new jobs, at least at historical levels, gone from the U.S. labor market?

In short, where have all the new jobs gone? Not every estimated new job has gone to graveyards (as soldiers do in Pete Seeger’s antiwar folk song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”). But a good many are missing in action from the U.S. labor market.

Let’s look more closely at this “unusual and challenging development,” especially for workers looking for a job, and at what put the kibosh on so many potential new jobs.

Vanishing New Jobs

Each monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), along with their annual revisions, reveals that even more jobs have disappeared from what the BLS had previously reported. The BLS revision of the employment numbers from March 2024 to March 2025 wiped 911,000 jobs from their jobs count. That cut reduced average estimated monthly job creation by more than half, from 147,000 to 71,000 jobs a month. After Trump’s Liberation Day announcement of his ever-changing, draconian tariff regime in April of this year, things got worse. From May through August, the economy added an average of just 27,000 jobs per month. The Wall Street Journal editors called it “The Trump Summer Jobs Stall.” On top of that, a quarter (25.9%) of the officially unemployed (those who want a job and had looked for a job in the last four weeks), have gone more than half a year (27 weeks) without a job, the highest figure since February 2022 when the economy was still recovering from the Covid pandemic downturn.

With the current government shutdown, the BLS report on the September employment situation was not available. Economists have now turned to private sources for employment data, such as ADP, the giant payroll-processing company. The ADP Employment Report (which covered more than half a million private companies with more than 26 million employees) estimated that the U.S. economy lost 32,000 private-sector jobs in September.  That was the largest drop in private employment reported by ADP since March 2023. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that through August, U.S. companies had already announced more job cuts than they had in all of 2024, and more than any year since 2020. 

What Sent So Many New Jobs to the Graveyard?

There doesn’t seem to be much controversy about what’s brought job creation to a near halt. The data point persuasively to one culprit, Trump’s tariffs. 

The evidence is not just that job creation nosedived following the imposition of Trump tariffs. In addition, job creation by smaller employers, which have less wherewithal to withstand the impact of tariffs than larger employers, has been especially affected. The ADP Employment Report made that clear. Smaller establishments with fewer than 50 employees lost 40,000 jobs in September, while large establishments with 500 employees added 33,000 jobs.

On top of that, industries with greater exposure to tariffs lost jobs while employment in industries with less exposure to tariffs increased. That’s clear in the BLS August 2025 employment report. Mining and logging, construction, manufacturing (especially motor vehicles and parts), and wholesale trade all lost jobs in August. Health care and social assistance (which includes hospital care, childcare, food assistance, and other medical and social services), on the other hand, added more jobs than those other industries lost combined. Economist Rebecca Patterson at the Council on Foreign Relations put it best,  “If America wasn’t getting older and sicker, we would have a negative payroll print today. That’s not a good thing.” The decades-long decline of manufacturing employment continues unabated despite Trump’s promise to reverse it. Since January of this year, manufacturing has lost 38,000 jobs in a growing economy. 

It is hardly news to U.S. employers that Trump’s tariffs are what’s killing off new jobs. For instance, Julie Robbins, chief executive of EarthQuaker Devices, a manufacturer of guitar pedals in Akron, Ohio, told the Financial Times, “These tariffs are just a drain on American manufacturers like mine. There’s no benefit. It’s an abrupt tax that is impeding our ability to hire and grow.” And the Wall Street Journal editors reported that, “Nearly all industries on the Institute for Supply Management survey last month reported a slowdown from tariff uncertainty.”

Making Job Creation Flourish

The Trump tariffs are so poisonous that even The Wall Street Journal editors concluded, “the best news for the economy” would be if the Supreme Court finds Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. That would help but not put an end to the debilitating uncertainty of Trump’s tariff policies. 

More substantial help is needed. In his song, Pete Seeger asks, “Where have all the graveyards gone?” He answers, “Gone to flowers, everyone.” To make the graveyard of new jobs flourish, we’ll need a massive jobs-creating green public investment. Green New Deal investment would be a major engine of job creation, as economist Robert Pollin has documented, typically creating twice as many jobs as the same size investment in fossil fuels does. It’s high time we pick up our banjos and raise our voices to make that happen.

John Miller is a professor emeritus of economics at Wheaton College and a member of the Dollars & Sense collective.