Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 110,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in June. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals exceeded those expectations. CNBC News reported:
Job growth proved better than expected in June, as the labor market showed surprising resilience in the wake of President Donald Trump’s calls for interest rate cuts. Nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 147,000 for the month, higher than the estimate for 110,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, against a forecast for a slight increase to 4.3%.
There’s nothing especially wrong with the preliminary topline totals from June — 147,000 jobs is a mediocre number, though hardly a disaster — but as is always the case, context is everything.
Over the first six months of 2025, the latest data suggests the economy has added 782,000 jobs. That said, over the first six months of 2024 — when Donald Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was 985,000 jobs, and over the first six months of 2023, the U.S. economy added 1.53 million jobs.
In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first six months of this year show the slowest job growth in the United States since 2010, when the economy was still trying to recover from the Great Recession.
In other words, the White House and its allies are likely to celebrate the new not-that-bad data as terrific news, but the question the president and his team ought to face is simple: “Why has American job growth slowed this year to a 15-year low?” This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
