The unemployment rate for veterans ticked down from 4.2% to 4.1% in February despite the Trump administration’s push for major cuts in the federal workforce, the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday in its monthly jobs report.
The jobless rate for the post-9/11 generation of veterans also dropped from 4.7% to 4.3% while the unemployment rate for the general population went up slightly from 4.0% to 4.1% as the economy added 151,000 jobs in February in another sign of the labor market’s resilience, the BLS report showed.
The new 151,000 jobs added were below market expectations in the range of 170,000, but President Donald Trump seized on the 10,000 new jobs in the manufacturing sector cited in the BLS report to tout the success of his economic strategy.
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“We’ve not only stopped the manufacturing collapse, but we’ve begun to rapidly reverse it and get major gains,” Trump said in Oval Office remarks. “These aren’t government jobs, which actually we cut. These are private-sector manufacturing jobs. So we gained all of those jobs, 10,000 jobs, and we’ve barely started yet. That’s very unusual.”
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell later signaled that he was still confident in the nation’s economic stability despite the slashing of the federal workforce by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and the market indexes all flashing red through Thursday in response to Trump’s on-again, off-again imposition of tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
“Despite elevated levels of uncertainty, the U.S. economy continues to be in a good place,” Powell said at a University of Chicago event Friday.
Powell’s remarks, and Trump’s touting of new manufacturing jobs, appeared to head off what was shaping up as another down day for the markets as stocks rallied by midday.
The latest BLS report came at the end of a week in which new Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins announced plans in the coming months to slash about 80,000 jobs at the VA, where veterans make up about 27% of the workforce, according to VA data.
Since Trump took office, a total of more than 62,000 jobs have been cut at 17 federal agencies, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which specializes in assisting laid-off workers.
Veterans advocates said the impact of the federal workforce cuts for veterans likely had yet to show up in the latest BLS jobs report, since the practice of the BLS is to report on data collected by the middle of the month, and the job cuts mainly came in the latter part of February.
“We’re concerned about what the next month looks like,” said Will Attig, executive director of the Union Veterans Council at the AFL-CIO. “There’s a lot of anger and despair from a lot of veterans” over the cutbacks.
Attig, a former Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq, said that he expected to see in the March jobs report from the BLS “the real impact on the veterans community” of the federal workforce firings.
“All we want is fairness,” and “we’re not getting it,” he said.
“All ears are to the ground to see how this plays out,” Kevin Rasch, the Warriors to Work regional director at the Wounded Warrior Project, said of the plans by Trump and Musk to downsize the federal workforce. “We’re all kind of in a holding pattern.”
Related: Unemployment Rate for Veterans Spiked More than a Percentage Point to 4.2% in January
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