“To me, today’s jobs report is what entering a recession looks like,” Josh Bivens, chief economist of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement. “Could we pull up? Sure. But if we look back and end up dating an official recession that starts 3-6 months from now, this is what it would look like today – rapid softening/deterioration in the labor market.”
USA Today
August 4, 2025
“It takes a tighter labor market for them to have any leverage,” said Elise Gould, a labor market expert at the Economic Policy Institute.
Financial Times
August 4, 2025
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute , a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank, noted in a blog post that “the law is designed to trigger a massive redistribution of income to the wealthy,” not to benefit the working class, as the Trump administration claims.
Univision
August 4, 2025
“The economy runs on reliable data,” said Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department economist who served in the administration of President Barack Obama. “Businesses use these numbers to decide whether to hire or expand. The Federal Reserve uses them to set interest rates. State and local governments use them to plan budgets. If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data – or suspect the data are being manipulated – confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded.”
U.S. News & World Report
August 4, 2025
Heidi Shierholz, the Labor Department’s chief economist from 2014 to early 2017 during President Barack Obama’s administration, said the charge from Trump “is outrageous and shows a total misunderstanding of how government statistical agencies work” to compile data, she said.
USA Today
August 4, 2025
Manufacturing, the federal government, and professional and business services have shed jobs
Source: Economic Policy Institute Analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Washington Post
August 4, 2025
Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist of the Department of Labor and now the president of the Economic Policy Institute, told the Post that firing a nonpartisan analyst for merely reporting bad news was “straight out of an autocratic playbook.”
She told the Post, “If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data — or suspect the data are being manipulated — confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded.”
Poynter
August 4, 2025
“If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data — or suspect the data are being manipulated — confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible,” Heidi Shierholz, the president of the center-left Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist of the Labor Department, told the Post. “It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded.”
Politico Playbook
August 4, 2025
The FT notes that economists say wages are often more volatile for the lowest-paid employees, as they typically have less bargaining power in a weak jobs market.
“It takes a tighter labor market for them to have any leverage,” said Elise Gould, a labor market expert at the Economic Policy Institute.
PYMNTS
August 4, 2025
“The labor market is much weaker than originally reported the last two months. While payrolls grew 73k in July, May and June data were revised down a total of 258k to 19k and 14k, respectively,” wrote Economic Policy Institute economist Elise Gould.
New Republic
August 4, 2025