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The Federal Work Force Grew Briskly Under Biden. It’s Still Historically Low.

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Government agencies that shrank in President-elect Trump’s first term have mostly bounced back, and some have become even larger.When it comes to the federal payroll, two seemingly contradictory things are true.One, the Biden administration went on a hiring spree that expanded the government work force at the fastest pace since the 1980s. And two, it remains near a record low as a share of overall employment.In the four years separating President-elect Donald J. Trump’s two terms, the federal civilian head count has risen by about 4.4 percent, according to the Labor Department, to just over three million, including the Postal Service.But that’s a much slower pace than private payrolls have grown over the past four years. And it leaves the federal government at 1.9 percent of total employment, down from more than 3 percent in the 1980s.The incoming administration promises to erase whole sections of the federal bureaucracy: Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of what Mr. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, has said 75 percent of the work force could go, in pursuit of $2 trillion in cuts. But it will be a challenge to find cuts without depleting services.“When we’re looking at the numbers of the federal work force, it’s still about the same size as it was in the 1960s,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a think tank. “The narrative out there is the federal government work force is growing topsy-turvy, and the reality is that it’s actually shrinking,”Compared with the overall work force, the federal employee base has been shrinking for decadesNot including the armed forces, federal government employees as a share of all nonfarm workers are near an all-time low.

Federal employment includes the Postal Service.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesHow Big Are Agencies, and Have They Grown or Shrunk? The number of people who work in the federal government’s largest departments, and how they’ve changed in size since 2020.

Note: Total work force numbers are as of March 2024.Source: Office of Personnel ManagementBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. Employers Add 256,000 Jobs in December

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    A December gain of 256,000 blew past forecasts, and unemployment fell to 4.2 percent. But markets recoiled as interest rate cuts seemed more distant.Employers stuck the landing in 2024, finishing the year with a bounce of hiring after a summer slowdown and an autumn marred by disruption.The economy added 256,000 jobs in December, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The number handily beat expectations after two years of cooling in the labor market, and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent, which is very healthy by historical standards.The strong result — unclouded by the labor strikes and destructive storms of previous months — may signal renewed vigor after months of reserve among both workers and businesses. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent from November, or 3.9 percent over the previous year, running well above inflation.“This employment report really crushes all expectations,” said Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at BMO Capital Markets. “It kind of wipes out the summer slump in payrolls we saw from June to August before the big Fed rate cut in September.”The apparent turnaround in employment growth, however, dampens chances of further interest rate cuts in the coming months. Investors already expect Federal Reserve officials to hold steady at their meeting in late January. For monetary policymakers, the robust growth means that additional easing could reignite prices and stymie progress on inflation.“The Fed is like, ‘We think this is a good labor market, we want to keep it that way, we don’t want it cooling further,’” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. “What they haven’t said is, ‘We want to heat the labor market back up.’”Unemployment rate More

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    Retailers may be taking a more staggered approach to holiday hiring.

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    Every year, retailers race to hire workers to staff their stores and distribution centers to meet the demand that comes with millions of Americans shopping for Christmas and other winter holidays.This seasonal hiring is often seen as a measure of the health of the retail industry and the U.S. economy more broadly.On Wednesday, November data released by the Labor Department showed that seasonal hiring in 2024 in the retail trade sector was lower than a year earlier. But that may also reflect changes in how companies go about it.The struggle to hire workers as the economy reopened in late 2020 and early 2021 led several retailers to start spreading out their hiring throughout the year, relying less on bringing on help rapidly in the weeks immediately before the holiday shopping season. Other retailers have said that they focus on offering their current workers more shifts before hiring seasonal workers.Ahead of the 2024 holiday shopping season, major retailers like Target and Bath & Body Works said they expected their hiring of seasonal workers to be on a par with the year before. Macy’s said it aimed to hire 31,500 workers, slightly down from its target in 2023. Amazon said in October that it would hire 250,000 people to support its fulfillment and transportation operations, in line with its goal from the previous year. At Amazon, the jobs included full-time, part-time and seasonal positions.For retailers, seasonal hiring does not take place just within stores. During the Covid pandemic, as a response to the boom in e-commerce shopping, retailers increasingly focused on hiring people to work within distribution centers that handled online orders.Seasonal hiring has implications beyond December, as many retailers convert a certain percentage of temporary workers to permanent positions. Gap Inc., which also owns Banana Republic and Athleta, said one in 10 of its seasonal workers in 2024 was hired into a full-time position. More than half of Target’s seasonal workers were hired for full-time positions after the 2023 holiday shopping season. More

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    Can Low Unemployment Last Under Trump?

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    Hiring has slowed, but joblessness remains at levels defying economic norms. Big policy changes under a new administration could test that resilience.For a time, not too long ago, it was the central question animating economic forecasts and bets laid by investors in financial markets: Will the U.S. economy avoid a recession?Now, for many in the business world, that question feels almost passé, part of an earlier, more fretful era of narratives.After a superlative run of hovering below 4 percent for more than two years, the unemployment rate — at 4.2 percent — has ticked up since last spring. But only by a bit so far; the December reading will come on Friday. While hiring has slowed, layoffs remain low by long-term standards.Inflation, having calmed substantially, is still being eyed warily by the Federal Reserve, which began steeply raising interest rates in 2022 to combat price increases. But at three consecutive meetings in the final months of 2024, the Fed slightly lowered the key interest rate it controls — an attempt to surgically take some pressure off commercial activity and support employment.Predictions of a downturn, once omnipresent, were mostly absent from the year-ahead forecasts that major financial firms typically send around to clients over the holidays.Near the start of 2024, Jeremy Barnum, the chief financial officer at JPMorgan Chase, told listeners asking about U.S. economic vitality during a conference call, “Everyone wants to see a problem — but the reality is we aren’t seeing any yet.”

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    Unemployment rate
    Note: Data is seasonally adjustedSource: Bureau of Labor StatisticsKarl RussellWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    November Jobs Report Shows Gain of 227,000; Unemployment Rises

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    Hiring bounced back after disruptions from storms and a major strike.Job creation bounced back in November after disruptions from storms and a major strike, reinforcing a picture of modest employment expansion over the past several months.The U.S. economy added 227,000 jobs, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. With upward revisions to September and October figures, the three-month average gain is 173,000, slightly higher than the average over the six months before that.The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent, from 4.1 percent in October, as fewer people were able to find work. But for those who had jobs, wages jumped more than expected and were 4 percent higher than they were a year earlier.Unemployment rate More

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    For Those in Need of a Job, Landing One Might Still Be a Challenge

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    The unemployment rate, at 4.1 percent in October, remains low by historical standards. But under the surface, there are signs that it can be difficult to land a job.The share of unemployed workers finding jobs has been falling, and the average duration of unemployment has been rising — two indications of mounting strain for job seekers.The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a steep drop in the job-finding rate in October, extending previous months’ declines. That points to a potentially challenging dynamic: Layoffs remain relatively low, but people who lose their jobs could be struggling to find new ones.The average number of weeks of unemployment also hit a two-and-a-half-year high in October, at 22.9 weeks, up from another recent high of 22.6 weeks in September. In the past few months, more people have been falling into the category of long-term unemployment, typically defined as being out of work for more than six months.A recent downturn in open roles could have been contributing to the strain on job seekers, keeping many unemployed for longer. Available positions in September tumbled to 7.4 million, resembling prepandemic levels.Job openings did tick up in October, surpassing expectations, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released this week. And in a survey conducted last month by the Conference Board, roughly 15 percent of consumers said jobs were hard to get, down from the almost 18 percent who said the same in October, hinting at easing conditions. More

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    October Jobs Report Shows Hiring Slowed Amid Storms and Strikes

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    U.S. payrolls grew by only 12,000 in October, a figure that left markets placid but fueled political contention. Unemployment remained 4.1 percent.Job creation stalled in October, a month battered by strikes and hurricanes, presenting an unclear picture of where the labor market was headed even as overall economic growth remained impressive.Employers added only 12,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, substantially fewer than economists had forecast. The unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, remained 4.1 percent.The report is the last before a presidential election in which polls have consistently found the economy to be a top issue for voters, and the low figure supplied a talking point for Republicans. It also strengthened the case for another interest rate cut when Federal Reserve policymakers meet next week.“It’s hard to say, ‘This was a strong report if it were not for the strikes and hurricanes,’” said Oliver Allen, a senior U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “If the numbers still look like that next month, and we have another step down in revisions, it’s a pretty weak set of prints.”Gains for August and September were revised downward, bringing the three-month average to 104,000 — down from 189,000 over the six months before that.Markets took the muddled data in stride, but the political reaction was fierce, with former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign saying the report was “a catastrophe and definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”Wages Rise SlightlyYear-over-year percentage change in earnings vs. inflation More

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    The Jobs Report on Friday May Be a Fluke and a Political Football

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    This close to an election, even the driest economic data can be politicized. So if the monthly jobs report lands on Friday with an unusually low number of jobs created in October, Republican campaigns may blast it out as a sign that the labor market has taken a turn for the worse. (Last month, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida reacted to a strong report by calling it “fake.”)That wouldn’t necessarily be true.The last couple of months have seen an unusual amount of disruption. First came the Boeing strike in September, taking some 35,000 workers off payrolls, plus another 6,000 from smaller strikes. Then came Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which spiked unemployment claims by about 35,000 in early October.All in all, economists are forecasting a gain of 110,000 jobs in October. That would be a significant step down from the 186,000 jobs added on average over each of the previous three months, pending any revisions. But it also wouldn’t be an accurate representation of employers’ appetite to hire.In general, a broad spectrum of data suggests that the labor market has settled into a moderate pace of job growth, enough to soak up the 150,000 or so people who enter the work force each month. The unemployment rate has fallen back to 4.1 percent, and overall economic growth came in strong last quarter, showing that the foundations of the economy are sound. More

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    U.S. Employers Add 254,000 Jobs in September as Economic Growth Remains Solid

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    U.S. employers added 254,000 jobs in September, a sign that economic growth remained solid. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent.Many have doubted it. Even the optimists have worried about it. But despite the hand-wringing, the American economy appears to be in remarkably good shape.Businesses added 254,000 jobs in September, the government reported on Friday, far surpassing forecasts. It was a sign that the economy, rather than stumbling into a slowdown, still has a spring in its step.The unemployment rate declined to 4.1 percent, from 4.2 percent. Reported pay gains for workers were also better than expected, at 4 percent over the previous 12 months, an uptick from the August reading. With inflation continuing to ease substantially, that is welcome news for households trying to gain financial traction.A Slight DropUnemployment rate More