• Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attacks on Social Security aren’t about efficiency. The word “efficiency” may be in the name of his initiative to reduce the size of the federal government, but a more accurate description of what President Trump’s advisor is doing to Social Security is sabotage.

• DOGE announced plans to cut Social Security staff by 7,000 workers—12% of the workforce. The Trump administration also plans to shutter or shrink dozens of Social Security Administration offices around the country.

• Administrative costs are less than 1% of Social Security spending. Since almost all Social Security spending goes towards benefits, which are set by statute, gutting the agency won’t save money for participants.

• The only way that slashing the number of workers will save large sums money is by making it hard for people to access benefits they’ve earned. Such backdoor benefit cuts, and making a popular government program look bad, are the real goals behind DOGE attacks on Social Security.

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The Trump administration has ramped up its immigration enforcement over the last month, and claims to be targeting  “the worst of the worst” for detention and deportation. However, several reports detail how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is targeting individuals simply for exercising their right to free speech, even going as far as repealing the immigration status of those who are lawfully in the United States and removing them without any due process. Further, ICE has wrongfully detained a growing number of U.S. citizens in Trump’s crackdown on immigration.    

Last week, ICE agents violently removed organizer and advocate Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez from his car while dropping his partner off at work. Juarez is well known in Washington state for fighting for farmworkers’ basic rights, such as overtime pay and protections from extreme heat. Although Juarez lacks an immigration status and had an order of removal dating back to 2018, he had no criminal record and was thus likely targeted for his work with workers’ rights organizations. He is currently being held in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Nearly half of farmworkers are undocumented immigrants according to government estimates, which means they are much more likely to be the victims of workplace violations like wage theft because they fear deportation if they speak up to defend their rights. The targeting and detention of Alfredo Juarez is a prime example of how employers and the government can exploit an individual’s immigration status to intimidate workers from exercising their right to organize as a means of improving their working conditions. We don’t know how Juarez got on ICE’s radar, but could a disgruntled and anti-union employer have called ICE and told them to look into Juarez? It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and it’s certainly a tactic that employers have at their disposal, especially now under the current White House leadership which ultimately values terrorizing immigrants rather than public safety or workers’ rights.

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Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 228,000 jobs added in March. Read the full thread here. 

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Cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, sometimes called food stamps) are inevitable if Congress and President Trump continue down the budget path they have laid out. Despite President Trump’s claim that he is opposed to cutting Medicaid, he enthusiastically endorsed the budget resolution passed by the House of Representatives in February. The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that achieving the level of spending reductions specified in this resolution would require cuts to Medicaid (and more cuts on top of that). The House FY 2025 budget resolution calls for, among many other things, an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and requires $2 trillion in spending cuts. To pay for this, the budget resolution has asked House committees that oversee both Medicaid and the SNAP to identify hundreds of billions in potential cuts. The anticipated cuts to both Medicaid and SNAP threaten the economic security of millions of working families.Read more

Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on today’s release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for February. Read the full thread here.

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Between 2020 and 2024, South Carolina’s job growth meaningfully outpaced job growth nationally. Our recent report analyzes the state’s economic boom in recent years, fueled in part by federal investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. A key industry in the state is manufacturing, especially tires, auto, and auto parts manufacturing. South Carolina’s political leaders boast that the state leads the nation in the export of tires and completed passenger vehicles.

Even before federal investments spurred the state’s manufacturing growth, lawmakers were using generous economic development subsidies to lure manufacturing to South Carolina. While the state’s approach has created jobs, the quality of those jobs and the overall benefit to South Carolina communities—at substantial public cost—remains dubious.

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Workers of color make up more than 40% of the U.S. labor force, and that share is growing as more of the white non-Hispanic population reaches retirement age and recent immigration trends help sustain the growth of our labor force and economy. Over the last five years, workers of color—who identify as Black, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), and American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN)—made significant gains in employment and earnings. This was a direct result of the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to full employment during the post-pandemic recovery and the Federal Reserve’s successful navigation of a soft landing. But Trump’s anti-worker, anti-immigrant policy actions could soon erase this progress.

The broad-based nature of the labor market recovery is most evident when examining the employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio of prime-age workers between the ages of 25 and 54. Unlike the unemployment rate, the EPOP ratio is not influenced by changes in labor force participation since it captures the share of workers during a given period that have a job. The prime-age EPOP ratio is also less influenced by college attendance and the aging of the population when compared with the employment rate of all workers. As shown in Figure A, the employment rate of prime-age Black, Hispanic, AAPI, and AIAN workers hit record highs within the past few years. For example, the share of prime-age Black workers with a job reached a historic peak of 77.7% in 2023.

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In a move that starkly exposes just how disingenuous the Trump administration’s pro-worker rhetoric really is, President Trump rescinded the Biden administration’s executive order that increased the minimum wage for workers on federal contracts. The Biden-era rule implementing that executive order raised the minimum wage for workers on federal contractors to $15 an hour in 2022 and indexed it to inflation going forward. As of January 1, it was $17.75 an hour.

Trump rescinded this order two weeks ago and I’ve been struck by the lack of attention it has received. This action is not just a bureaucratic adjustment—it is a direct assault on the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers.

When the Biden-era rule was being developed, we estimated that it would give a raise to nearly 400,000 low-wage federal contractors. Who are these workers? They are janitors who clean government buildings, food service workers on military bases, cashiers in gift shops in national parks, and security guards protecting federal property—everyday people trying to make rent, buy groceries, and support their families. A minimum wage of $17.75 an hour translates into annual earnings of less than $37,000 for a full-time worker. The Trump administration is acting to ensure they get even less.

The Trump Department of Labor (DOL) will need to go through the rulemaking process to actually overturn the higher minimum wage for federal contractors—just rescinding the executive order doesn’t overturn the rule that was put in place to implement it. Until that happens, the minimum wage for federal contractors is still technically $17.75. However, Trump’s DOL has publicly announced they will no longer be enforcing the higher minimum wage. In other words, there won’t be any consequences for not complying, inviting employers to cheat their workers.

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Many of Donald Trump’s economic plans put forward during the presidential campaign seemed extremely unwise even to the corporate leaders who supported him and care about profits over everything else. Universal and large tariffs and mass deportations, for example, were clearly anti-growth policies that could hurt profit growth. Often, these corporate leaders and other campaign supporters pushed the narrative of a “stock market veto” that would keep the Trump administration from pursuing some of its most anti-growth policies. The thinking was that President Trump constantly invoked stock market increases during his first term as evidence of his good economic management, so any policy effort that could cause stock market declines would be quickly abandoned.

So far, the “stock market veto” has turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. In his second term, President Trump has continued to loudly proclaim his support for the anti-growth policies of broad and high tariffs and mass deportations. He has also added a new anti-growth twist of arbitrary and illegal firings of federal employees and cancellations of federal contracts. Finally, he has enthusiastically backed a U.S. House budget resolution that would slash disposable incomes for the bottom half of U.S. households. Besides being substantively unwise, these policy efforts have been undertaken with maximum chaos.

And the stock market has indeed rebelled. The S&P 500, for example, is down 8% in the last month.

This raises the question: Was there ever anything useful in the “stock market veto” view of the world? After all, there is no general correlation between stock market movements and what’s good for broadly shared growth, so it seemed odd to think a stock market veto would somehow come to the aid of the broader U.S. economy.

In what follows, we’ll present the good and the bad of stock market ups and downs and what they might mean for the trajectory of economic policy. In the end, it turns out that today the stock market and the economy are mirroring each other: Stock market weakness is reflecting broader economic weakness. In short, if there was ever going to be a “stock market veto” of broadly anti-growth policies, it is past time for it to kick in.

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Today is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2025 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2024 simply to match what men were paid in 2024. On an hourly basis, women were paid 18.0% less on average than men in 2024, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, marital status, and state.

In our 2024 blog, we documented the lack of progress in narrowing this gender wage gap for the majority of the past three decades. We show that despite a decline in the pay gap between 1979 and 1994—due as much to men’s slower growing wages as to notable increases in women’s wages—it has remained mostly flat up until 2022. Since then, our data library shows slight improvement toward closing the gender wage gap, from 20.0% in 2022 to 18.9% in 2023 and 18.0% in 2024, the lowest it has ever been. These gains are promising and likely driven by a strong labor market recovery from the COVID-19 recession that lifted wages more at the lower end of the overall wage distribution. If this strong recovery is threatened—as it has been by recent Trump administration actions—these gains could be short-lived.Read more