Trump’s War on Labor Data Didn’t Change the Economic Outlook

President Donald Trump’s shake-up at the Bureau of Labor Statistics — and baseless claims that the agency was inaccurately reporting jobs numbers — didn’t change the actual economic trend lines: job growth slowed significantly during the president’s first year back in office, the highly anticipated December jobs report found.

The unemployment rate for December punched in at 4.4% — just a tenth of a point lower than the month prior — with 50,000 new jobs added, according to the report. Economists and data watchers were eagerly awaiting the first good look into the job market since the government shutdown precluded crucial data-gathering work. But the report wasn’t surprising.

“All the numbers are pretty much the same,” said Gbenga Ajilore, the chief economist at the left-leaning think tank the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And the December figures didn’t provide the evidence Trump has sought to back his claims that he has created a hot economy. In August, the president fired Erika McEntarfer, then the bureau’s commissioner, which authors the monthly jobs reports. Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that the July jobs data was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

In all, 584,000 jobs were created in 2025 — a significant decline compared to the 2 million jobs in 2024. Except for 2020, when the pandemic brought the economy to a standstill, it was the worst year for job creation since the recession.

Economists who spoke to NOTUS said there was nothing suspect about the December jobs report, however.

“There is no evidence that there is anything untoward about these numbers,” Ajilore said.

Ryan Young, a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he believes BLS is “operating in good faith” and not “being politicized right now.” But that doesn’t mean the agency, which sits within the Department of Labor, escaped the consequences of a chaotic year for the federal government.

“I trusted BLS before and I do now, but the fact that they’ve shed so much staff is affecting the quality of their work,” Young said, adding that the statisticians are increasingly interpolating from the data and modifying their analyses to keep up with their responsibilities.

“It’s fine as a patch-up but it’s not something you want to have going on for years and years,” he said.

BLS is currently being run by an acting commissioner. The White House withdrew its initial nominee to replace McEntarfer, EJ Antoni of The Heritage Foundation, reportedly over concerns about his confirmation process.

The weak numbers can largely be chalked up to Trump’s policies, economists said. The president’s signature economic policy, his aggressive tariffs, have raised costs for many industries, particularly manufacturers who have created fewer jobs and lowered output as a result. Trump’s ambitious deportation campaign has also impacted the country’s labor supply and consumer market, economists said.

“Unless those things change, it’s going to be the same thing in 2026,” Ajilore said.

For his part, Trump posted unpublished, and then-confidential, jobs-market data Thursday night on Truth Social finding that the private sector added 654,000 jobs since January. The White House told news outlets that the premature post was “inadvertent.”