Dismal new job numbers might be a sign of Trump’s successes, not failures | Opinion
As I write this, the Democratic press releases are still being edited, but the collective scream soon to come is perfectly predictable. Already, Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu said on BlueSky that “Republicans are messing up the economy,” based on private jobs data that came out Thursday.
You can see why Democrats might make that argument. It seems the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a meager job gain in August of 22,000, with technical revisions to recent months data in the negatives by 21,000. Even without that revision, that’s a job growth rate of a tenth what Joe Biden achieved in good months during his term.
But the screams, and the rocketing stock market hoping for a rate cut based on the numbers, miss the fact that this dismal employment picture might be a sign that Donald Trump’s policies are working as intended.
So far under Trump, federal government employment is down 97,000 jobs. It was down 15,000 jobs just in August and it is going to keep going down as those who have already been fired, but are still getting severances, still count as employed. State government employment in August was down 13,000 too, which may reflect cuts to state government grants. And those numbers come as parts of the federal government that Trump likes, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement are on unprecedented hiring sprees.
The Trump administration also has cut tens of billions of dollars (maybe hundreds of billions) in nonprofit grants, on which the government spends a fortune. The BLS doesn’t report monthly numbers in the nonprofit sector, but you can expect that these cuts are having a big impact in the government-adjacent parts of the economy. One clue in the data is that “Religious, grant-making, civic, professional and similar organizations” employment fell 3,000 in August.
In recent months, the federal government has rounded up tens of thousands of often-employed undocumented immigrants all over the country in industries from construction and agriculture to transportation and manufacturing. That’s a net negative for job growth too. Employment among Hispanics was down 15,000 jobs in August according to the new BLS data.
Right now it is unclear how this is playing out in individual sectors of the economy as these are “employment” numbers. If someone is deported and the job is filled right away, employment stays the same, but if the job is not filled it goes down.
Trump’s tariffs, which continue to roil the economy, are going to cut into jobs in international trade even as Trump hopes manufacturing jobs come home. Manufacturing employment was up by 2,000, if you leave out strike-impacted transportation equipment production.
I am no fan of Trump’s mercantilist economic policies, but any analysis of these job numbers has to consider how much of this is a sign of MAGA success, not economic disaster.
David Mastio is a national opinion columnist for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star.
This story was originally published September 5, 2025 at 1:22 PM with the headline "Dismal new job numbers might be a sign of Trump’s successes, not failures | Opinion."
