A volatile month of July saw employers shed 23,000 jobs and lay off another 153,000, according to the monthly jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday. Amid the plunge, the unemployment rate for veterans appeared to stabilize at 4.2% despite the impact of artificial intelligence, tariffs and the war in Iran.
The 4.2% jobless rate for all veterans was up a tick from the 4.1% recorded in June, while the rate for post-9/11 veterans dropped from 4.8% in June to 4.7% in July. The unemployment rate for women veterans, meanwhile, went up from 3.6% in June to 3.8% in July.
The BLS report also included revised figures on the number of jobs added in June and May, which showed major downward trends. The initial May numbers showed that 129,000 jobs had been added, but that number was revised downward to 63,000. June’s initial job growth number was 57,000, but that number was revised to 20,000.
In addition, the BLS report stated, “Among the unemployed, the number of people on temporary layoff increased by 153,000 to 921,000 in July,” and the “number of permanent job losers changed little at 1.7 million.”
Friday’s BLS report came out the day after President Donald Trump declared at a Las Vegas rally that the U.S. economy was “the greatest in the history of the world,” although archived BLS reports show that the U.S. economy has added a total of 542,000 jobs over the 19 months of Trump’s second term, while nearly 2.7 million jobs were added in the last 19 months of the Biden administration.
In response to Friday’s report, White House aides put out not-to-worry statements noting job growth in construction and manufacturing.
White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a released statement that the “Trump industrial resurgence is on schedule.”
“Manufacturing (which added 5,000 jobs in July) and factory construction jobs grew again in July even as government payrolls continued to significantly shrink,” Desai said. “Unemployment claims are at record lows.”
On Fox Business News, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said that the end of the FIFA World Cup was a factor in the number of jobs lost. He described it as a “sort of rebound from all the employment we got from the World Cup, because the World Cup was ending.”
Hassett’s comments contrasted with the analysis of other economists who have focused on the eventual long-term impact of artificial intelligence and the uncertainty over whether the chokehold on oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz can be lifted.
“It’s a bleak (BLS) report,” Heather Long, chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a phone interview with Military Times. The report shows that “a lot of people are leaving the labor force,” and “there’s no doubt that the job market has flatlined in President Trump’s second term.”
“It’s just not a dynamic jobs market,” she added. “Tariffs and the war in Iran have caused companies to cut back” on hiring. To sidestep hiring slowdowns due to the impact of AI, “young people are looking again at trade schools.”
The BLS report also highlighted one of the great counter-intuitives of American economics: people losing their jobs can be good news for the stock markets, Long said.
By midday Friday, the Dow Industrial Average was up 50 points, possibly indicating that investors were betting on the gloomy jobs report making it unlikely that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates in September.
