For those hoping to see improvements in the U.S. economy, the latest jobs report offered another round of discouraging news: The unemployment rate has reached a four-year high, and job growth has slowed to levels unseen since the Great Recession.
Pressed for some kind of explanation for the administration’s economic failures, the White House has pushed a curious line about the differences between public sector jobs and private sector jobs.
As part of a bizarre statement about the latest employment data, for example, press secretary Karoline Leavitt emphasized that “100% of the job growth has come in the private sector.” Donald Trump emphasized the same point on Wednesday night as part of his prime-time address, as did JD Vance a day earlier, at the vice president’s economic speech in Pennsylvania.
A couple of months ago, the president pushed a similar message at an event in South Korea. “The government created no new jobs,” the Republican said. “The private sector created the record number of jobs that we’re talking about. … We have real numbers. These are real numbers.”
Part of the problem here is with the White House’s underlying assumption that there’s something inherently wrong with public sector employment. That’s absurd: Firefighters, teachers, police officers and librarians are all public sector employees, and the suggestion that their jobs are somehow lesser because taxpayers are responsible for their salaries is ridiculous.
But there’s a related concern that Trump and his team have been reluctant to acknowledge: If the White House wants to talk about the job growth that has come in the private sector, it’s picking a fight it can’t expect to win.
To help contextualize matters, I put together a new chart showing private sector job growth by year since the Great Recession (excluding 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the job market) with data by way of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The red columns show the months in which Trump was in the White House, while the blue columns reflect Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s terms.
That column on the right side of the image? That’s this year. That’s also what the incumbent president expects Americans to see as the greatest economy in the history of the United States. In fairness, it’s important to emphasize that the 2025 data isn’t fully complete: It doesn’t include December’s totals, which won’t be released until early January. That said, barring some kind of miracle this month, this year will be the worst year for private sector job growth since 2009, at the height of the Great Recession. What’s more, something I noticed when putting this together is that during Trump’s first term — an era that Republicans continue to point to as the single greatest economy in generations — business hiring was fine, but it fell short of the kind of growth Americans saw during Obama’s second term. All of which is to say, if the White House wants to take a closer look at private sector jobs, that’s certainly a conversation worth having, though these are actually the “real numbers.”
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
