American Prospect – The Trump administration’s war on reality will make it meaningfully difficult to understand the health of the economy in the coming months. If data is either not being collected or is no longer reliable, now that Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as punishment for weak jobs numbers, it’s hard not to succumb to bias or motivated reasoning, on either side of the political divide. So before we get murkier radio signals, we need to assess the numbers we have now, to inform the trends for the future. Most of this picture is mixed and influenced by a bunch of different factors. But we can say one thing definitively:

Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office. Only 597,000 jobs have been added in the first seven months of the year, a 44 percent drop from the first seven months of 2024, as former Biden economist Heather Boushey notes. The year has seen low hiring and a low quit rate, as people hunker down in the jobs they have. There are fewer entry-level positions and Americans aren’t moving very much for work. That’s a housing story but it’s also a job security story, and the expectations are even worse: The University of Michigan survey shows expectations for a higher unemployment rate next year at the highest level since the Great Recession…”