Despite the White House touting May’s jobs report as a sign of economic strength, a closer look reveals a sharp decline in federal employment under the Trump administration — reversing a year of government job growth under former President Joe Biden and shifting all 2025 job gains to the private sector.
In an article for Townhall published Monday, economist EJ Antoni noted that the number of jobs in the federal government (excluding the postal service) “has now fallen every month this year, bringing the number of federal payrolls down to the lowest level since November 2023.”
“A whole year’s worth of burgeoning bureaucracy has been undone in a few months, and the war on waste continues,” he said.
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“Under President Biden, the government accounted for a disproportionate number of new jobs as runaway government spending and hiring artificially inflated the labor market figures. Now, the situation has completely reversed as the Trump administration wages an all-out war on government waste, including the bureaucrats,” Antoni wrote.
The economist pointed out that reductions in the federal workforce have effectively canceled out employment gains at the state and local levels, leaving total government payrolls unchanged since Trump took office in January.
As a result, all job growth in 2025 has come from the private sector — a sharp contrast to the government-driven hiring seen during the Biden administration, the piece noted.
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The author further highlighted that the latest jobs data underscores ongoing weaknesses in the labor market.
In May, both the labor force participation rate and the employment-to-population ratio slipped, as household survey figures revealed nearly 700,000 fewer people working—and the vast majority, around 600,000, exited the labor force entirely.
“So yes, this latest jobs report has good and bad, but there’s also something ugly—and worrisome—in the statistics,” Antoni said.
“The Labor Department’s figures show the economy added 139,000 jobs in May, but the April and March numbers were revised down heavily by a total of 95,000. That means two-thirds of the payrolls added in May were jobs we thought the economy already had,” he added.
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AlterNet reached out to the Department of Labor for comment.
