Thanks, Trump: Jobs market grinds to a halt

President Donald Trump's economy continues to falter, with the private sector adding just 54,000 jobs in August, ADP announced on Thursday. That number fell way below the expectation of 68,000 jobs, and was a marked drop from July, when ADP estimated that the private sector added 104,000 jobs.

ADP blamed the slowdown in part on the uncertainty Trump’s reckless trade policy has created. Companies are being forced to either eat the cost of Trump’s nonsensical tariffs—forcing some to either conduct layoffs or cancel planned capital investments, slowing job growth.

“The year started with strong job growth, but that momentum has been whipsawed by uncertainty,” Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, said in a news release. “A variety of things could explain the hiring slowdown, including labor shortages, skittish consumers, and AI disruptions.”

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Among the troubling datapoints in ADP’s report is that the manufacturing sector lost 7,000 jobs in August—even though Trump said his tariffs were going to create a manufacturing resurgence in the United States as companies choose to make their goods here rather than import from abroad. Clearly that is not happening.

The news comes a day after the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the number of job openings in the country fell, with 7.2 million job openings in July, down from 7.4 million in June. That marked the first time since April 2021 that there were more job seekers than job openings in the U.S.—a bad sign for unemployed Americans.

"This is yet another crack in the labor market that illustrates how much harder it is to get a new job right now than what we've seen in a long time," Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a post on X.

Ultimately, the ADP report comes a day before the Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release its August jobs report.

It will be the first report since Trump fired the BLS chief, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, because he was mad that the agency's July jobs report showed job growth ground to a halt in the three months since Trump began his idiotic trade wars.

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Trump's firing of the head of the BLS calls into question the accuracy of further reports, with questions of whether future reports would be free of political influence. And that makes ADP’s jobs report carry more weight.

As our own Markos Moulitsas wrote in August:

Killing the BLS report won’t make the bad news disappear. It just hands the keys to the only other national monthly jobs snapshot: the private-sector report put out by payroll processor ADP. And ADP isn’t in the business of flattering presidents.

ADP’s August jobs report clearly did not flatter Trump, as it showed that the U.S. is not meeting the breakeven pace of job growth needed to keep the unemployment rate steady. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the U.S. needs to add about 153,000 jobs per month to keep the unemployment rate holding flat. 

That means August fell 100,000 jobs short of that goal. Thanks, Trump. 

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