The U.S. job market appears to be in turmoil as official figures for August 2025 hiring declined drastically.
This comes as employers added 22,000 jobs in August 2025, as the labor market continued to face uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s economic policies.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) made this known in the official figures released on Friday.
The BLS also reported the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021.
According to the report, the slowdown in the U.S. job market follows a revised June report showing a loss of 13,000 jobs, the first monthly decline since December 2020.
July’s hiring was also revised downward to 79,000 from an initial 258,000.
Meanwhile, in August 2025, industries like manufacturing and construction saw job losses of 12,000 and 7,000, respectively.
Also, workers’ average hourly earnings rose 0.3 per cent from July and 3.7 per cent from August 2024, exactly what forecasters expected.
Reacting to the situation, U.S. President Donald Trump took a pointed swipe at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for keeping interest rates high.
“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should have lowered rates long ago. As usual, he’s ‘Too Late!’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Also, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in his reaction on Friday, said that although the U.S. job market is down, there are indications that things will improve.
“A year from today, you’re going to see employment numbers you’d never imagine,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick further explained that tariffs will incentivize manufacturing job growth and the administration will train people to take on new jobs that tariffs will create in the United States.
“What it’s going to do is it’s going to take the 6.9 million Americans who are capable of working who are sitting on the sidelines now because they just haven’t had the jobs they were looking for, they’re going to come into the workplace,” Lutnick said. “We’re going to train 5 million Americans for these jobs.”
However, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett in his reaction, conceded that the jobs numbers were a “bit of a disappointment.”
He said: “This job’s number was certainly a little bit of a disappointment right now.
“There was a Goldman Sachs study that came out yesterday that showed that — because the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] hasn’t really done a good job on its seasonal adjustment in August — that they tend to revise this number up by almost 70,000 jobs when they give you a revised number a month later.”
