The U.S. economy added more than half a million new jobs during President Trump’s first year since returning to office, a dramatic slowdown in hiring that underscored the ways in which his agenda may be exacerbating some of the strains facing American workers and employers.
The full tally from the Labor Department, which arrived on Friday, showed subdued job growth through the final month of 2025. The White House heralded the figures anyway, as Mr. Trump and his aides looked to assuage an increasingly restive public about the trajectory of the economy.
In truth, the December jobs report highlighted a series of harsh realities that may help to explain voters’ persistent anxieties.
The labor market added about 584,000 jobs over the past 12 months, the slowest pace of job growth since 2020. It was also well below the longer-run average for the United States. Employers created more than 2 million jobs in 2024, the final year under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The figures released Friday were preliminary, and jobs totals for 2024 and 2025 are expected to be revised down substantially when more complete data is incorporated into the estimates next month.
The decline in hiring in 2025 likely reflects the steep slowdown in immigration that began at the end of Mr. Biden’s term and became even more pronounced when Mr. Trump returned to office and started mass deportations. With fewer people entering the country to work, employers don’t need to add as many jobs each month to keep up with population growth.
Still, there were signs that the labor market weakened in other ways last year. The unemployment rate registered at 4.4 percent in December from 4 percent last January. Employers posted fewer job openings and offered smaller raises to workers. More people also reported working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time positions.
Virtually all of the job growth in December — and in 2025 as a whole — occurred in health care, with other sectors, like retail, remaining largely stagnant. And manufacturing, a major focus for Mr. Trump, ended 2025 on a dour note, with the industry having lost about 68,000 jobs over the last 12 months on a seasonally adjusted basis.
Economists said that the figures amounted to a series of barometers for Mr. Trump’s second term, during which the president has pursued an agenda of wide-scale deregulation, generous corporate tax cuts, punishing global tariffs, tougher border enforcement and a full-scale restructuring of the federal bureaucracy. That effort alone resulted in the loss of roughly 277,000 jobs from the ranks of government last year.
Some of Mr. Trump’s actions may still foster economic growth, particularly if businesses invest more. Others, including the president’s trade and immigration policies, have cut into employers’ bottom lines or created enough uncertainty that firms are reluctant to spend or hire.
“Those policy decisions — immigration, tariff, trade — are probably central to the slowdown that we’ve seen, particularly if you’re comparing it to the last two years or so,” said Olu Sonola, the head of U.S. economic research for Fitch Ratings.
Mr. Sonola said he expected that “cooling” in the labor market to continue into 2026, sending the nation’s unemployment rate slightly higher, to 4.6 percent on average.
“It’s not going to be a boom by any means. It’s not going to be a bust by any means,” he said.
Voters, however, may see matters differently.
The American public has increasingly expressed dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy, recent polling shows. The president at times has brushed aside those criticisms, even suggesting voters’ concerns about rising prices are a “hoax.”
Mr. Trump has also continued to boast about the economy under his watch, and the White House has redoubled its campaign to convince Americans they are better off economically ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
On Thursday, ahead of the jobs report, Mr. Trump sought to make his latest case that the labor market remained strong, posting charts on social media that showed rising job growth in the private sector.
The graphics he posted touched off controversy on Friday, as they appeared to include some hiring figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics before the agency had released the data to the public.
That Mr. Trump would have those numbers early is not unusual — the White House receives the jobs report and other key economic data the afternoon before their release. But the numbers are meant to remain secret until they are released publicly. The data is of extreme interest to investors, who could in theory make money off the information if they got it before everyone else.
“This is market-moving information,” said Martha Gimbel, who worked at the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama and Biden administrations. “Anyone who saw that Truth Social post last night and guessed what it meant could probably do some trading off of that and make money.”
The White House later acknowledged that there had been “an inadvertent public disclosure of aggregate data,” adding that it was reviewing its protocols. It wasn’t clear whether any investors who saw Mr. Trump’s post figured out what they represented. And, even if they had, it might have been difficult to make money off the numbers in practice. Mr. Trump’s post showed only the full-year change in employment in the private and public sectors, not the latest monthly data, which would have been of more interest to investors.
“They gave me some numbers,” Mr. Trump later told reporters. “When people give me things, I post them. But the numbers are amazing.”
On Friday, Mr. Trump’s top aides labored to make the case for continued optimism around the economy. They maintained that the full thrust of their policies would yield additional growth into the new year, particularly in construction and manufacturing.
In a series of posts on social media, the Council of Economic Advisers said that the jobs figures from December underscored a “a stable labor market where workers’ purchasing power has been improving due to pay increases outpacing inflation.”
Kevin A. Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, later told CNBC that the hiring numbers “look a little bit different than every other indicator that we have.”
He pointed to other data released this week that showed a narrowing in the U.S. trade deficit, which Mr. Trump sees as crucial for economic success. And Mr. Hassett repeated his belief that the president’s tariffs and tax cuts could send the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its output, skyrocketing in 2026.
“With numbers like that, and G.D.P., and jobs here, which are a little bit lower than you normally have in a boom, it’s something of a puzzle for markets, I would guess. But the puzzle is resolved very easily if you look at the productivity numbers,” Mr. Hassett said.
He said workers were producing more under Mr. Trump, enabled by new technology, which had translated to a “heck of a lot of economic growth, and it doesn’t necessarily have to mean a whole huge amount of job creation.”
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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