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

Below is an excerpt from a piece originally published in The Briefing Book, a Substack publication. Read the full commentary here. 

Rising inequality has been a major social and economic problem for the United States for decades. The policy agenda to stop or even reverse this inequality must start with a clear understanding of what drove it. In our view, inequality has come from the labor market, and more particularly from a range of intentional policy decisions that disempowered typical workers when they have sought wage increases from employers. In an effort to disseminate facts about labor market trends more broadly, the Economic Policy Institute has constructed the State of Working America Data Library, which allows users to easily browse and collate detailed data on wages, incomes, and employment. We hope this tool fosters a broadly shared understanding of the labor market changes we need to achieve a fairer society.

Despite recent reductions in inequality, decades of policy failures fueled public discontent and enabled billionaire public influence

In any single year since 1979 there has been a maddening gap between what the U.S. economy could be delivering for working families and what it actually delivered. The richest country in the history of the world has routinely failed to offer broad-based economic security and prosperity through a cascade of policy failures. This gap between the potential and the reality of what typical families eke out of the U.S. economy has shown up directly in skyrocketing incomes for the richest households.

There is a strong case to be made that the 2024 economy—despite just being a few years clear of two global economic catastrophes (the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine)—had re-attained its pre-crisis performance in record time and in a way that directed more benefits to the lowest-paid workers.

Yet the anxieties driven by the crisis, the unfamiliar burst of inflation, and a decades-long legacy of typical families rightly feeling they weren’t the main focus of policymakers made U.S. households extremely sour about the economy. A fairer distribution of economic rewards in the decades before the crises might have made the public more optimistic about the rocky economic road of 2020–2024 and less willing to take a chance on the extreme policy shift that will come as a result of their election of Donald Trump.

Read the full piece in The Briefing Book. 

Reports indicate that the Trump administration has laid off nearly all staff at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as part of a massive number of staff cuts across the Department of Education. The NCES collects and analyzes crucially important datasets for researchers to use throughout the world. It’s likely that most Americans have never heard of the NCES, but all of us benefit from the work it does.

Here are five things we only know about our schools thanks to the NCES.

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In parliamentary systems, winning an election gives one party control of both legislative and executive powers. This means there are big policy swings after elections when parties switch. In the United States presidential system, the separation of powers combined with legislative chokepoints—like the Senate filibuster—means that opportunities for very large policy swings are much less common.

Even during times when the President is the same party as the majority of both the House and the Senate (a governing trifecta), the weirdness of Senate procedure (specifically the reconciliation budget process that allows one big budget bill per Congress to escape the filibuster) generally means that parties get one chance to affect a major policy change each congressional session.Read more

With Congressional Republicans having passed a budget resolution, one of the tax provisions certain to be discussed in federal budget deliberations will be President Trump’s expressed priority to exempt overtime pay from taxation. The idea has gained steam across the country, with lawmakers in 19 states already introducing bills in 2025 to exempt overtime pay from state taxes.

Like the misguided “no tax on tips” bills that have also been moving in some states, these “no tax on overtime” measures are a gimmick. Though pitched as support for regular working people, the primary beneficiaries of these proposals would be employers and high earners who game the system. Exempting overtime from taxation would do more harm than good, and there are far better ways to support workers putting in long hours.

In summary, exempting overtime from taxation would:

1. Encourage excessive hours of work while exacerbating inequities between workers able to work long hours and those who cannot.
2. Put downward pressure on base wages.
3. Open up a tax loophole easily gamed by high earners that would drain public budgets while further complicating the tax system.

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The Trump administration inherited the strongest economy of any president since George W. Bush—and unlike that economy, there was no obvious macroeconomic imbalance set to pull down growth. In short, the stage was set for the incoming administration to ride the desirable trends of rapid growth in jobs and real wages—as well as declining inflation—for an entire term of economic strength.

Instead, the administration seems determined to squander and wreck the strong economy. Each of the individual policies they are pursuing—illegal layoffs of federal workers, mass deportations, constant threats and retractions of broad-based tariffs, and Medicaid spending cuts—would be bad for the economy. But each policy is also being pursued with maximum levels of chaos and incoordination, creating unprecedented levels of economic uncertainty. This uncertainty is itself a serious economic threat.

Below, we sketch out the macroeconomic dangers posed by each of the administration’s big policy initiatives so far, and end with an assessment of where this leaves the U.S. economy. The best outcome that could result from continuing these policies would be avoiding a recession but still sharply reducing growth and creating an U.S. economy that is significantly poorer than it would have otherwise been. The most likely outcome, however, is a recession in the coming year.

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The Trump administration is reportedly preparing an executive order aiming to “abolish” the Department of Education—a prominent demand of far-right activists in recent years. His pick for Secretary of Education—Linda McMahon—is hostile to public schools and supports the privatization of public education.

The U.S. public education system needs all sorts of reforms to boost its capacity to provide an excellent education to all children. But public education is also why the United States became the richest country the world has ever seen, and its future depends on maintaining and strengthening this system—not tearing it down.

What does the Department of Education do?

The Department of Education (DOE) accounts for about 3.5% of the entire federal budget and provides crucial funding for public K–12 schools, narrowing some of the huge gaps between needed resources and state and local revenue. Specifically, the DOE provides funding for low-income children through Title I funds and funding for special education through IDEA programs. These resources help balance the scales of school funding, as high-poverty districts often get less funding from local sources, which rely heavily on property taxes. The DOE also administers crucial programs—like Pell grants and loans—that make college attendance possible for those who are not rich. 

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The Trump administration’s attacks on federal government workers will disproportionately harm veterans and their families. Nearly 900,000 civilian federal employees are either veterans, spouses of veterans, or spouses of active military, representing 30% of the entire federal government workforce.

Federal government employees are disproportionately likely to be veterans due to federal government hiring preferences. Table 1 shows that currently 758,300 civilian federal government workers are veterans, about 25% of federal employees based on January 2025 employment counts. Since there are about 7.3 million employed veterans, it follows that one out of every 10 employed veterans works for the federal government.

The federal government also employs nearly 250,000 spouses of veterans and spouses of active military. Together, the civilian federal government workforce consists of 895,900 veterans and spouses of veterans or active military. (Some federal government employed veterans are also spouses of veterans.)

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Below, EPI economists offer their insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 151,000 jobs added in February. 

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