Federal layoffs trigger a sharp slowdown in job growth: Unemployment rises to highest rate since 2021
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 41,000 jobs lost over October and November. Read the full thread here.
The Department of Justice is making a mistake by suing Minneapolis Public Schools: The union contract protects all workers while ensuring that Black and brown educators can hold on to good jobs
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit on Tuesday, December 11, against the Minneapolis school district, alleging that the contract the district signed with the teachers’ union—the Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE)—discriminates against white teachers by requiring the school district to shield Black and brown teachers from layoffs. The lawsuit fundamentally misrepresents the innovative Minneapolis union contract, which protects educators from arbitrary dismissal while also seeking to preserve a diverse teaching workforce. The lawsuit is however aligned with the Trump administration’s revisionist version of history that positions white workers as the primary victims of employment discrimination. At the same time, this ahistorical narrative dismisses the long and well-documented record of discrimination against Black and brown workers evident in persistent racial disparities in unemployment and pay—patterns the contract seeks to remedy. The lawsuit was filed soon after the Trump administration’s racist decision to target Minnesota’s Somali community and is yet another example of how racial animus is a defining feature of Trump’s policies.Read more
Trump’s deportation plans threaten 400,000 direct care jobs: Older adults and people with disabilities could lose vital in-home support
If the Trump administration follows through on its goal of deporting 4 million people over four years, the direct care industry would lose close to 400,000 jobs—affecting 274,000 immigrant and 120,000 U.S.-born workers. This dramatic reduction in trained care workers would compromise home-based care services, forcing family members to scramble for informal arrangements to support relatives who are older or have disabilities.Read more
Should high earners support scrapping Social Security’s cap on taxable earnings?
Earnings above a cap aren’t subject to the payroll taxes that fund Social Security. As a result, billionaires pay the same tax as someone earning $176,100 in 2025 (the cap is indexed to the average wage, so it changes every year).
“Scrapping the cap” is a popular and effective way to address Social Security’s funding gap. Nearly three-fourths of Social Security’s projected long-term shortfall would be eliminated if the cap were scrapped without increasing benefits.Read more
New measure of poverty shows that undoing ACA subsidies will push millions into economic insecurity: Communities of color would be hit hardest by Trump’s health care affordability crisis
A new measure of poverty that accounts for health care needs and resources being developed by the U.S. Census Bureau—the Health Inclusive Poverty Measure (HIPM)—shows that poverty affects even more people in the U.S. than the typical statistics estimate. This is particularly true for people of color. This is primarily a function of the limited access to health insurance that Black and Hispanic communities endure. Black and Hispanic individuals, for example, are more likely than peers to be uninsured and to rely on Medicaid for coverage. This is why we warned about the uneven impact of cuts to the program early this year.Read more
Rider in the House Homeland Security appropriations bill would increase the number of workers in the H-2B visa program by 113,000
This is part 2 of a two-part series analyzing the impact of an amendment to the House Homeland appropriations bill on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Read part 1 here.
Key takeaways:
- The government funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may include a rider amendment that would establish a new methodology for setting the H-2B visa program’s annual numerical limit. This amendment (originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment) would result in a cap of at least 252,000 visas in fiscal year (FY) 2026.
- H-2B visa extensions and job changes are not counted against the annual cap, but after adding them to the updated cap of 252,000, the total number of H-2B workers employed in FY 2026 would be 282,000, which is almost 113,000 greater than the total number of workers in 2024 and 2025.
- The rider would move 12,000 H-2B workers employed at carnivals, traveling fairs, and circuses to the P visa, which lacks any numerical limit on the number of visas, further expanding the number of exploitable workers in H-2B industries.
- The rider would restrict the already limited ability of H-2A and H-2B workers to change employers, leaving them more exploitable and vulnerable to workplace violations.
- This amendment in Congress would mainly benefit employers by allowing them to gradually hire an exponentially higher number of workers they can control, while undercutting labor standards for all workers.
In part 1 of this two-part blog post series, I provided background and discussion on a rider amendment that the Homeland Security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee proposed and passed over the summer. Originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment, it would make major changes to the H-2A and H-2B visa programs through the appropriations process, while completely circumventing the committees that should have subject matter jurisdiction in the House and Senate. Part 1 focuses on the changes and impacts in the H-2A program; this post will briefly explain the components of the rider that would make changes to the H-2B visa program and the impact of those changes, as well as one change that would affect both programs.
Governor DeWine acts “in the public interest” to veto a dangerous child labor bill in Ohio
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has vetoed a bill that would have extended the number of hours that employers can schedule 14–15-year-olds to work on school nights, in violation of federal law. DeWine vetoed the bill last week after advocates from a long list of child health and welfare, education, organized labor, and economic justice organizations publicly urged him to oppose the bill.Read more
Congressional budget amendment and new DOL wage rule together would greatly expand work visas for farmworkers and drastically lower their wages
This is part 1 of a two-part series analyzing the impact of an amendment to the House Homeland appropriations bill on the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Read part 2 here.
Key takeaways:
- The government funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security may include a rider amendment that would expand the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm jobs. This amendment (originally known as Amendment #1 but later dubbed the Bipartisan Visa En Bloc amendment) proposes to open the H-2A visa program to year-round occupations.
- There were 410,000 year-round jobs in agriculture and 353,000 seasonal H-2A workers in 2024.
- The Trump Department of Labor has issued a new 2026 H-2A Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) to set H-2A wages. Based on their own estimates, the 2026 H-2A AEWR will result in a $24 billion pay cut for H-2A farmworkers over 10 years and incentivize growth in the H-2A program to 500,000 jobs a year. EPI has estimated that U.S. farmworkers will lose $2.7 to 3.3 billion in wages per year.
- If employers are allowed to use H-2A visas for year-round jobs via the House Homeland appropriations rider, farmworkers in those jobs will see massive pay cuts of roughly $20,000 to $40,000 per year, starting in 2026.
- The Trump DOL wage reductions combined with H-2A visas for year-round jobs could expand the H-2A program to 900,000 workers in 2034, meaning that workers on temporary visas would account for 42% of average annual employment in agriculture.
- This rider in Congress and the proposed regulation at DOL would only benefit farm employers, allowing them to hire workers they can control for as little pay as possible. These changes would drastically lower pay for all farmworkers and lead to job losses for U.S. workers, a complete reversal from the Trump administration’s original claims that U.S. workers would fill the farm jobs left open due to deportations.
For well over a decade now—time and time and time and time again—Congress has been making policy changes to temporary work visa programs not through the normal process of debating and passing legislation, but through a backdoor process. This involves amendments to annual appropriations legislation (known as “riders”) that fund the U.S. government. Riders that make policy changes are much more likely to pass without much public notice, debate, or pushback relative to dedicated legislation, since they are smaller parts of larger, must-pass legislation to fund the whole U.S. government. The significant changes proposed or passed in riders over the past decade have all pushed temporary work visa programs in the same direction: expanding and deregulating the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, which benefits employers at the expense of U.S. workers and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers who will continue to see reduced wages and poorer working conditions. It’s already clear that low-wage work visa programs won’t be improved during the Trump administration; instead, they’ll be made much worse.
This fiscal year, there is a particular urgency around the riders to expand and deregulate the H-2A and H-2B visa programs, in light of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort that is arresting and deporting workers at a breakneck pace, as well as canceling temporary immigration protections that provided work authorization to millions. The Trump administration got the ball rolling on this effort with a new proposed H-2A wage regulation issued by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) on October 2, 2025. This proposed regulation contains a stunning admission: The administration’s mass deportation effort is likely to raise food prices. DOL’s solution to this problem of the administration’s own creation is an irrational and anti-worker solution. Instead of pushing the administration from within to stop their campaign of mass deportation, DOL proposes to lower farmworker wages by $24 billion over the next 10 years.
Without today’s jobs report, next-best data indicate a weakening labor market
In normal times, today would have been a jobs day. However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been forced to delay the release until December 16 due to the lingering impacts of the Trump administration radically restricting BLS operations during the government shutdown. Further, BLS has announced that we will never have data from the monthly survey of households for October. This means that valuable information for that month—like the overall unemployment rate or the unemployment rate for various demographic groups—will never be known. During the last federal shutdown in 2018–2019, BLS did not suspend its activities and released its employment situation report as normal. In fact, this is the first time in 12 years that a jobs report was delayed and the first time a month of household data will be missed completely.
Federal statistical agencies (FSAs) like BLS and the Census Bureau provide the gold standard data that are crucial for understanding the labor market. The monthly jobs report provides policymakers, businesses, and the public with the most rigorous and timely labor market data they need to make high-stakes decisions. Unfortunately, without a timely release, the Federal Reserve will meet next week without the best data on the state of the labor market. This will materially harm their ability to make a data-informed decision on interest rate policy.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has sought to weaken FSAs. In August, Trump fired the BLS commissioner for accurately reporting data that the administration found politically inconvenient. Amid these historically unprecedented threats, we assembled a new Data Accountability Dashboard that tracks next-best data from other (non-federal) data sources—including ADP employment data, job cut announcements from the Challenger report, and consumer sentiment reports.
These are clearly inferior to the datasets that have historically been collected and analyzed by the nonpartisan, expert professionals who work at FSAs, but they still provide some insights into the direction the economy is moving. This data would also—over time—provide some potential signal if official FSA data were being manipulated or suppressed to hide an economic downturn. Updates to those next-best data this week suggest some weakening in the labor market. Whether this is supported by the FSA data coming back online in coming weeks is a key question people should be watching.
The missing piece in the affordability debate: Higher paychecks
This op-ed was originally published on MS NOW. Read the full piece here.
Affordability—or the lack of it—is dominating the public discourse. “Affordability, affordability, affordability: Democrats’ new winning formula,” proclaims Politico. “Trump tries to seize ‘affordability’ message,” reports The New York Times. Election results in New Jersey, Virginia, New York and elsewhere showed that voters are responding to candidates who speak directly to the cost of living.
Today’s affordability debate, however, focuses almost entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life affordable is to make things cheaper. But that approach misses the bigger picture. Affordability depends on both prices and wages. The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay.
For more than four decades, employers have been actively suppressing the wages of working people, so that corporate managers and owners can claim an ever-larger share of the income generated by what workers produce. Government policies facilitated these efforts.