The U.S. job market appears to be slowing under President Donald Trump, as the latest jobs report found the U.S. economy added just 50,000 jobs in December, below economists’ consensus estimate of 55,000 jobs.
The report, released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), also reveals that the U.S. economy as a whole created only 584,000 jobs in 2025, less than a third of the 2 million jobs created in 2024 during the final year of former President Joe Biden’s term.
The 2025 figure also marks the lowest number of annual jobs created since 2020, when the economy was shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fox Business Anchor Cheryl Casone couldn’t put a happy spin on the jobs report after its release, as she noted that gains in just 37,000 private-sector jobs during the month were “much smaller than expected.”
Delving deeper into the report, Bloomberg economic analyst Joe Weisenthal observed on
“It’s not just that total manufacturing employment is declining,” he explained. “The number of manufacturing subsectors that create jobs is rapidly declining. Of the 72 different types of manufacturing tracked by the BLS, only 38.2% are still creating jobs. A year ago, it was 47.2%.”
Heather Cox Richardson, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted that labor market weakness extends beyond manufacturing, as there has been “almost no hiring outside of health care and hospitality” since the start of Trump’s second term.
Richardson also observed that “there has been almost no hiring since April” of last year, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which sent shockwaves through the global economy.
Economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, focused on downward revisions to previous jobs reports, noting that the current job market is anemic.
“With the revisions, the average for the last three months was a decline of 22,000 (jobs),” Baker said. “The health and social assistance sector added an average of 49,000 jobs during this period, meaning that outside of the health sector, the economy lost an average of 71,000 jobs over the past three months.”
Alex Jacquez, chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, said the jobs report reflected a “lifeless economy,” and he blamed Trump and his trade policies as the main reason.
“Working families face slow wage growth, fewer job opportunities and relentless price increases for groceries, basic necessities and utilities,” Jacquez said. “Despite the president’s relentless attempts to distract from the grim economic reality, workers and job seekers know that their budgets seem tighter than ever because of Trump’s disastrous economic mismanagement.”
Economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute looked at the employment numbers and concluded that the U.S. job market is now much weaker than when Biden left Trump nearly a year ago.
“The slowdown in job growth this year is marked compared to 2024,” Gould wrote on Bluesky. “The average monthly gain was only 49,000 in 2025, compared to 168,000 in 2024. Over the past three months, average job growth has actually been negative, meaning there are fewer jobs today than there were in September.”
