A Bad Jobs Report
Plus: Eric Adams drop-out watch, DOJ investigates Lisa Cook, critiquing Blueskyism, and more...
Employers added 22,000 new jobs in August. For those paying attention, this is substantially below what had been forecast.
Employers added 22,000 jobs in August, with private sector payrolls up 38,000.
The unemployment rate rose to 4.3% (This is the highest since 2021.)
Job growth for June was revised down to show a *loss* of 13,000 jobs, and July was revised up to a gain of 79,000 from 73,000. On…
— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) September 5, 2025
The jobs report was released early Friday morning, and it indicated a rising unemployment rate, plus job numbers adjustments for June and July. TLDR: things don't look great.
Some silver linings: Though job growth was low, layoffs were also relatively low. That said, people who have been fired or laid off have struggled to get back on their feet: "The number of people with continued unemployment claims has been elevated since April," reports The New York Times.
Health care alone added 31K jobs. The rest of the economy lost jobs
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) September 5, 2025
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day's news every morning.
It is very likely now that the Federal Reserve Board will drop interest rates, something they've hesitated to do for about the last nine months. But with a struggling labor market, it might be time. (The stock market is reacting fine to all this news; though a bad jobs report isn't great, an interest rate cut could be good.)
"Although there's no evidence of rapidly mounting layoffs, in July the number of unemployed people surpassed the number of available jobs for the first time since the spring of 2021. Job openings have fallen sharply for two months in health care, which has been the main industry driving growth over the past year," reports The New York Times. "Also in the labor market weakness column: data from the payroll provider ADP, which showed just 54,000 private-sector jobs were added in August. Since the public sector most likely shed jobs last month as the Trump administration continues to fire people, the total number could be lower."
One interesting nugget: This month's report showed 12,000 lost manufacturing jobs, which makes a total of 78,000 lost over the course of this year. If one goal of President Donald Trump's tariffs was to revitalize domestic manufacturing, it sure doesn't look like things are going according to plan.
Scenes from New York: Democratic Mayor Eric Adams, who is seeking reelection in a race against Democratic nominee/frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, hardcore law-and-order Republican Curtis Sliwa, and former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has reportedly confided to trusted advisers that he might drop out, having been in talks with the Trump administration recently in Florida.
It's also rumored that the administration reached out to Sliwa, in hopes of slimming the race down to just Mamdani vs. Cuomo; Sliwa does not appear interested in taking any Trump offers.
"I don't think you can win, unless you have one on one," said Trump when asked about the mayoral race. "I would like to see two people drop out and have it be one on one. And I think that's a race."
("Is there any scenario, any, where Curtis Sliwa drops out of this race?" asked radio host Sid Rosenberg of Sliwa yesterday morning. "Yeah, if somebody puts a bullet in the back of my head, and I'm in a casket," replied Sliwa, who survived a shooting back in '92.)
QUICK HITS
- The Justice Department has opened up a criminal investigation—related to her purported mortgage fraud, as in: declaring two residences to be her primary—into Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board. "The move…was instigated by Ed Martin, a hyperpartisan Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience," reports The New York Times. "He has said that it is legitimate for federal officials to publicly air criminal investigations into people targeted by the president, even if an investigation does not result in a conviction or even an indictment….Martin, who has been given few staff but broad latitude to team up with U.S. attorney's offices around the country, flouted the department's procedural norms last month by suggesting to the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, that Ms. Cook step aside." "At this time, I encourage you to remove Ms. Cook from your board," Martin wrote in a letter to Powell last month. "Do it today before it is too late! After all, no American thinks it is appropriate that she serve during this time with a cloud hanging over her."
- Inside the tech CEO dinner at the White House (for which Elon Musk was notably absent).
- Sometime today, the president will sign an executive order renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War. At least it's honest!
- "Since the election, Bluesky has lost ground," writes Nate Silver at his Substack. "More precise data based on the number of unique 'likers', 'posters' and 'followers' at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump's inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half." Silver details what a bubble Bluesky is, disproportionately used by people in D.C. and folks in "crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon" (lol). But "demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It's not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique."
- Yep:
Zohran Mamdani's education policy isn't about supporting low-performing kids, it's about eliminating high-performing kids. pic.twitter.com/dxntoLWPrQ
— Niels Hoven ???? (@NielsHoven) September 4, 2025
