During the presidential campaign, many people noted that a prospective Trump administration could trigger sustained upward pressure on inflation and interest rates if it tried to violate the Federal Reserve’s independent decision-making. This certainly seems to be happening now, as President Trump has made escalating threats to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell for the sin of not doing exactly what Trump wants with interest rates. Preventing the political capture of Fed decision-making is the only thing standing in the way of the Trump administration seizing control of monetary policy and fueling higher inflation and interest rates for typical working families.

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On July 7, 2025, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) introduced a legislative package aiming to provide certain portable benefits to workers classified as independent contractors. “Portable benefits” is an umbrella term for various benefit programs that follow workers from job to job, rather than being tied to a specific employer. The legislative package is framed as an effort to address the rise of nontraditional work arrangements and the gig economy, in which workers are typically not classified as employees and therefore lack access to certain guaranteed workplace rights or longstanding employment-based benefits like health care and retirement benefits. While misclassification of workers as independent contractors represents a significant problem, the legislative package fails to address this important issue in the gig economy. Instead, the bills would institutionalize a second-tier status for independent workers and entrench their exclusion from the full protections and benefits guaranteed to traditional employees.Read more

Congress has failed workers for decades. Policymakers have not raised the minimum wage in nearly 20 years. They have not passed legislation to fix our nation’s broken labor law, leaving the National Labor Relations Act largely untouched for more than 60 years. Further, they have failed to pass legislation providing U.S. workers with paid sick leave, predictable work schedules, and workplace protections against extreme heat. 

Given Congress’s inability to pass legislation protecting workers’ wages and health and safety, federal regulations are critical to ensuring that workers have meaningful protections. However, Trump and his Department of Labor (DOL) recently announced a massive deregulation effort, robbing U.S. workers of dozens upon dozens of rules that protect them from being forced to risk illness and injury on the job and ensure that they are paid for their labor.

Federal regulations are written by agencies to carry out the specifics of laws passed by Congress. Since laws can remain unchanged for decades, regulations make sure that laws are implemented and administered effectively. Since returning to office, Trump has unleashed a deregulatory agenda that requires agencies to identify 10 regulations to repeal in order to enact one new regulation. This framework perpetuates the misguided belief that regulations are burdensome for employers and harm economic growth. On the contrary, the long-term benefits of regulations consistently outweigh the costs—and research shows their impact on jobs is either neutral or modestly positive.

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In many states across the South, the public sector is a key driver of economic growth and improvements in most Southerners’ quality of life. The public sector includes workers in federal, state, and local government that we all rely on to educate children across the region, care for sick and elderly family members, ensure food and water are safe to consume, provide public transportation and sanitation services, and ensure access to a wide range of other public services. 

Unfortunately, many in the U.S. fail to recognize how central the public sector is to their daily quality of life. Further, these workers and the public sector generally are often maligned by lawmakers seeking to undermine public agencies and the workers that staff them. This facilitates disinvestment in the public sector. Over the last few decades, public-sector wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living, retirement benefits have been cut, and workloads have steadily increased as workers have left or been pushed out of these jobs. These declines in public-sector job quality across the South have led to higher turnover rates, understaffed agencies, and a decline in the quality of public services. 

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Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report for June released this morning. Read the full thread here. 

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Yesterday, the Senate passed a budget bill that will create a weaker and more unequal U.S. economy. It is even more radical than the House version, with deeper Medicaid cuts that will destroy rural hospitals and strain state budgets, while adding nearly $4 trillion to the federal deficit. The House should reject this legislation and start from scratch. The stakes couldn’t be higher—the bill being rushed to passage will do grave damage to the economy and the well-being of U.S. families for years to come.

The bill is designed to cause a shocking upward redistribution of income. It includes draconian spending cuts—mostly to health care and food assistance for children and families—in order to give massive tax cuts to the wealthiest households. Because these cuts to health care and food assistance are so broad and deep, and because the tax cuts for anybody who is not already rich are so paltry, the bill will cause the bottom 40% of households to actually lose income on average. This group includes roughly 125 million people, and for a family of three it will include households with incomes up to $85,000. Meanwhile, households in the top 0.1% (those making over $3.3 million per year) will gain over $100,000 annually under this bill.

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The writer Dan Davies once noted that “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” It’s always a useful insight, and particularly relevant to how the Senate passed its version of the radical Republican budget bill earlier this week.

The legislation is mostly a stunning exercise in the upward redistribution of income, consisting of huge tax cuts mostly for the rich and steep spending cuts mostly for health care and nutrition assistance programs used by vulnerable families. But because the tax cuts boosting incomes for the rich are so large, even with the steep spending cuts, it is also an exercise in significantly increasing federal deficits and debt.

The Senate version of the bill would add nearly $4 trillion to the federal debt. This is a lot to be adding to the federal debt during a time when unemployment is low, inflation is above-target, and interest rates remain far higher than they’ve been for most of the last 15 years.

Further, if Republicans wanted to add $4 trillion to the national debt, they could write a check for $12,000 to every single adult and child in the United States. Yet, the bottom 40% of households in the U.S. won’t get any benefit at all from this bill, instead their incomes will outright fall. Why? Because all of that $4 trillion (and more) is needed to write enormous checks to the richest households. For example, the richest 130,000 households—who currently make more than $5 million per year—will receive almost $300,000 annually from the Republican budget bill.

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The Trump administration has set a goal of deporting one million immigrants annually. Although they currently lack the resources to meet that target, the Republican budget bill just passed by the Senate would dramatically boost funding for immigration enforcement. Mass deportations will cause grave damage to the economy, with significant job losses for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers. If Congress passes the Republican spending bill and Trump succeeds in carrying out his deportation goals, I estimate that 5.9 million workers will lose their jobs over the next four years. Of those total losses, 3.3 million fewer immigrants and 2.6 million fewer U.S.-born workers will be employed (see Figure A and methodology below).

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State spending on public education declined markedly in the dozen years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. This decline in funding was a response to the Great Recession since many state governments prioritized spending austerity in the wake of global economic decline. They paired tax cuts with cuts in public services, including education spending, causing a huge contraction in the amount public schools received to educate kids.

While some states managed to expand education spending in the ensuing recovery, many states did not, and in some cases, their education spending relative to their capacity to spend on education, is actually lower than it was before the Great Recession. This is especially the case in the South, where public education spending is declining in real terms (adjusted for inflation), even as Southern states grow more prosperous.

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On July 1, the minimum wage will increase in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C.—lifting wages for more than 880,000 workers and collectively raising their earnings by more than $397 million (see Figure A). In addition to these two states and D.C., 12 cities and counties are also increasing their minimum wage this summer, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.Read more