Braxton Taylor
The labor market flexed its enduring strength in the latest jobs report Friday as the economy added 228,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate for post-9/11 veterans dropped from 4.3% to 3.1% despite stock market cratering and federal workforce cutbacks.
President Donald Trump quickly seized on the positives in the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that the 228,000 hirings in March blew past Wall Street predictions of job growth in the range of 130,000 to 140,000. In a post to Truth Social, Trump said, “Great job, numbers are better than expected. It’s already working. Hang tough. We can’t lose!!!”
But the data in the BLS report cited by Trump was collected by mid-March, well before the sweeping tariffs he announced this week and the subsequent tanking of the stock indexes.
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In remarks to reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One, after announcing across-the-board tariffs on imports to the U.S., Trump said, “I think the market is gonna boom,” despite what was shaping up as a global trade war, but “you gotta’ give it a little time.”
Trump’s optimism was lost on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who gave prepared remarks at an event in Arlington, Virginia.
“We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation” as a result of Trump’s policies, Powell said. “While tariffs are highly likely to generate at least a temporary rise in inflation, it is also possible that the effects could be more persistent.”
Powell’s statements added to the bear market gloom on Wall Street by signaling that the Fed board would be reluctant to lower interest rates later this year in the middle of the trade war, which Trump started by imposing tariff rates that eventually would exceed the 20% rates imposed under the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 that contributed to the Great Depression.
Steve Rattner, chairman of Willett Advisors LLC and an MSNBC contributor, joined with the estimates of several other economists in saying on the news channel that Trump’s tariffs when fully implemented would be in the range of 25%. The impact of Trump’s announcement on tariffs was such that the J.P. Morgan brokerage firm raised its estimate Friday on the odds of the nation going into a recession from 40% to 60%. “Disruptive U.S. policies have been recognized as the biggest risk to the global outlook all year,” the firm said in a note Thursday.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank by more than 1,600 points Thursday in response to Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, and the major slide appeared to continue through midday Friday as China’s Finance Ministry said that Beijing would be hitting back by imposing 34% tariff rates on all U.S. imports.
The BLS jobs report stood out as a bright spot amid the market panic and a report Thursday by the Challenger, Gray and Christmas outplacement firm that public and private U.S. employers announced 275,240 job cuts in March, a 60% increase from the 172,017 cuts announced in February.
More than 200,000 of the announced cuts were from the federal workforce, although the majority of the announced layoffs have not yet been acted upon. For instance, the Department of Veterans Affairs has announced plans to cut more than 80,000 workers, but only about 2,400 have thus far been dismissed.
The unemployment rate for the general population ticked up from 4.1% to 4.2% while the rate for all veterans dropped from 4.1% to 3.8%, the BLS said. The rate for the post-9/11 generation of veterans, which tends to fluctuate more than the rate for all veterans, went down more than a percentage point from 4.3% in February to 3.1 % in March, the BLS report said.
“Job gains occurred in health care, in social assistance, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment also increased in retail trade, partially reflecting the return of workers from a strike. Federal government employment declined,” the BLS report said, but did not give any numbers to back up the statement.
Government hiring actually increased in March with 19,000 jobs added, Robert Frick, corporate economist for Navy Federal Credit Union, told Military.com. But “obviously the future looks grim for government employees. It’s ominous,” he said, as billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, continues to slash through the federal government.
The unemployment rate for veterans “is going to go up from here because veterans are losing their jobs” in the Trump administration’s declared war on waste, fraud and abuse in the federal workforce, Frick said. His “worst-case scenario” is that about 300,000 of the three million federal workers would lose their jobs if Trump and Musk have their way.
“That would double the unemployment rate for veterans,” Frick said.
In a separate phone interview, Will Attig, executive director the Union Veterans Council at the AFL-CIO, agreed with Frick’s assessment that the jobless rates for veterans will only increase as the job cuts escalate.
“We’re really just at the cusp of this,” said Attig, a former Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq. “Everyone is waiting for the next shoe to drop when it comes to layoffs in the veterans community.”
In addition to the federal layoffs, “whole companies are about to go under water,” and “a lot of vets work for contractors,” he said.
The numbers in the BLS monthly reports “haven’t really shown anything yet” in the way of massive layoffs for veterans, said Kevin Rasch, the Warriors to Work regional director at the Wounded Warrior Project, “but there’s a lot of anxiety” in the veterans community.
“The financial stress is real. We’re all waiting to see what happens” if the Trump administration goes ahead with threatened cuts at the VA, the Defense Department and other agencies, said Rasch, a retired Navy commander and helicopter pilot.
The stat in the BLS report that stood out for Jon Retzer, the deputy national legislative director for health at the Disabled American Veterans service organization, was the jump in the unemployment rate for female veterans to 5.4% from 2.4 % in March 2024.
“There is a gender bias that unfortunately exists” for women transitioning out of the military, said Retzer, a disabled veteran and former Army specialist who served in the first Gulf War in the 1990s. “We are concerned to see this trend.”
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