The jobs market opened the new year with 130,000 jobs added in January, higher than economists’ expectations, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Wednesday.
Unemployment sits at 4.3%, a tenth of a percentage point lower than in December. The health care, social assistance and construction industries saw the most new jobs created, while the federal government and financial activities industry lost jobs.
The jobs numbers were double what economists estimated for January, but below the jobs numbers from January 2025. The new report also revised the total number of jobs the U.S. economy added in 2025 to 181,000, a significant drop from the originally estimated 584,000 jobs.
It wasn’t just economists who were setting expectations low. President Donald Trump’s economic advisers took to cable news Tuesday to assuage concerns about the economy ahead of the BLS’ publication of jobs data.
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National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said GDP growth supports job creation, but the productivity boom spurred by AI and a shrinking workforce due to departing immigrants is reducing employers’ demand for labor.
“One shouldn’t panic if you see a sequence of numbers that are lower than you are used to, because again, population growth is going down and productivity growth is skyrocketing. It’s an unusual set of circumstances,” Hassett said during a CNBC appearance Monday.
The U.S. economy added a mere 50,000 new jobs in December, down from 323,000 in the same month of the prior year.
Trump adviser Peter Navarro said figures below 100,000 new jobs are closer to what the labor market requires as immigrants leave the country.
“We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like,” Navarro said on Fox Business Tuesday. “Wall Street — when this stuff comes out — can’t rain on that parade, they have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market.”
Once the report was released, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers took to social media to tout the latest numbers. “The January monthly data came in FAR above expectations,” read a post on the CEA’s X account.
The economy is proving to be one of the defining issues of the midterms.
The Trump administration has made inroads. Companies’ productivity and profitability soared in 2025, according to St. Louis Federal Reserve data. While the inflation rate increased from its lows in the spring, it held steady at 2.7% in November and December. The BLS will release inflation data for January on Friday.
But voters aren’t feeling relief in their pocketbooks.
A majority of Americans consider top spending categories, like food and housing, unaffordable, according to a study by the Pew Research Center this month. About half of Americans say Trump’s policies have worsened the economy in his second term.
Trump has sought to shape the numbers coming out of U.S. economic data agencies. In August, the president fired BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, writing on Truth Social that data released under her leadership was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
The Trump administration has also disbanded economic data advisory groups and proposed budget cuts to BLS, raising concerns among economists that the changes will make data less accurate and trustworthy.
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