When the federal government last month reported a sharp decline in the nation’s hiring, President Trump dismissed the numbers, claiming without evidence that they were “rigged,” and then ousted the official responsible for producing them.
The release of a second consecutive poor jobs report on Friday confirmed the reality that Mr. Trump has been trying to avoid. The labor market is stalling — and the nation is facing real strains — under the weight of his economic agenda.
Eight months into his second term, the sum of Mr. Trump’s high tariffs and mass deportations appear to have created noticeable pressure on employers. The economy added only 22,000 jobs in August, according to the latest readout from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate rose slightly, to 4.3 percent, a nearly four-year high. And the revised data showed that employment fell by 13,000 in June, the first net loss of jobs since the end of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, when the pandemic was raging.
Analysts offered a variety of explanations for the slowdown. The president’s tariffs on nearly all imports have driven up costs for companies and prices for consumers. Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown has made it harder for many businesses to find workers, while simultaneously reducing the need for them because they now have fewer customers. The federal government has cut jobs directly and canceled grants and contracts that have bled into the private sector. The uncertainty surrounding Mr. Trump’s ever-shifting policies has made corporate executives more cautious about hiring and investing.
But those explanations all ultimately boiled down to one key factor. Mr. Trump, who regained control of the White House on promises of faster growth and lower prices, has established policies that are having precisely the opposite effect. Inflation data, due next week, is expected to show that consumer prices rose more quickly in August as companies increasingly pass along the cost of higher tariffs.
“We’ve got a private sector that’s caught in a pinch here between these higher cost pressures and reduced demand,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist for the consulting firm EY-Parthenon. “Both measures, whether it’s inflation or employment, are moving in the wrong direction. They’re moving toward a stagflationary environment.”
Mr. Daco and other economists raised similar concerns a month ago, when the government reported that job growth had been far weaker in the spring and summer than previously believed.
But Mr. Trump instead attributed the poor marks at the time to political bias at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the jobs report. He fired its Senate-confirmed leader, Erika McEntarfer, and nominated E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist and political ally, to fill the post. (Mr. Antoni has not yet been confirmed.)
Economists and former B.L.S. officials across the political spectrum denounced the moves and contested Mr. Trump’s assertions that the data had been manipulated to harm him — a claim for which the president and his advisers provided no evidence. And they warned that by politicizing the data, Mr. Trump was threatening to making it harder for policymakers, investors and business leaders to gauge the true state of the economy.
“It’s like gouging our eyes out,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “It makes it hard for us to see what’s happening around us and it worsens the decisions we make.”
He added: “All just because the news is a little embarrassing.”
The good news is, Friday’s report made clear that the Bureau of Labor Statistics remains free of political control. Even Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council and an indefatigable cheerleader for the president’s record, had to acknowledge in a CNBC interview that the numbers had been “a disappointment.”
Still, Mr. Hassett shrugged off the significance of the numbers. He predicted that labor officials would revise the number in due course, which would show greater job gains, as he tried to portray the economy as stronger than it appeared.
Mr. Hassett pointed to the commitments from major tech companies and manufacturers to invest more heavily in the United States, which he ascribed to the president’s agenda, including his tax cuts. That, he added, had helped to facilitate the conditions for the economy to grow by nearly 4 percent this year, though economists outside the White House have offered far less rosy estimates in recent weeks.
Even before the government released its latest findings, Mr. Trump sought to explain away the slowdown in the labor market. Asked if the nation’s economic data could be trusted, given his decision to fire Ms. McEntarfer, the president told reporters late Thursday that the “real numbers” would arrive “in a year from now” as companies begin to invest more in the United States.
Some economists do think that a modest pickup in growth is likely next year, as tariff uncertainty fades and as the tax cuts that Congress passed early this summer begin to reach businesses and consumers.
The Federal Reserve is also widely expected to cut interest rates at its meeting later this month, and could reduce them further in the months ahead, which would encourage more hiring and investment. Mr. Trump has blamed the Fed frequently for any turbulence in the economy, even though the central bank has kept borrowing costs unchanged out of concern that the president’s policies could cause prices to spike.
The president did so again on Friday, attacking the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, for not lowering borrowing costs quickly enough.
“We just have to get through these next few months,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “If we can muddle through, then we can get that pickup in growth in 2026.”
The trouble for Mr. Trump is that he didn’t campaign on a platform of “muddling through.” Most economists no longer anticipate the recession that they feared when Mr. Trump first announced sweeping tariffs last spring, in large part because the president quickly reversed course once financial markets rebelled. But they do expect a sustained period of faster inflation and slower growth, now that the White House has started to impose higher taxes on imports from more than 90 countries.
And while Mr. Trump and his allies can attack the agencies that produce the data, the numbers mostly reflect what Americans already know. Surveys show that workers are worried about holding onto their jobs and pessimistic about their chances of finding a different one. Measures of consumer sentiment have weakened, in part because people anticipate higher prices as a result of tariffs.
“For now the data remains consistent with the view that the jobs market is cooling, but not collapsing,” said James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING. Pointing to one of those consumers surveys from the University of Michigan, which showed a dip in confidence, Mr. Knightley added: “Workers are certainly worried, though.”
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the economy for nearly 20 years.
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