Trumponomics Is Starting to Have Some Ugly Effects

We got a much better sense of what the American labor market is doing today. And the news was not good.

The economy added only 22,000 jobs last month, far fewer than economists had predicted, according to a new release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new data also shows that the economy gained slightly more jobs in July than we thought at the time, but that it actually lost 13,000 jobs in June — making that month the first since 2020 to see a true decline in U.S. employment.

The unemployment rate now stands at 4.3%, one tenth of a percent higher than it was last month. All in all, the American labor market has been frozen since President Trump declared “Liberation Day” and announced a bevy of new tariffs in April.

On the one hand, some aspects of that job loss shouldn’t be a surprise. As we’ve covered at Heatmap, the Trump administration has spent the past few months attacking the wind, solar, and electric vehicle industries. It has yanked subsidies from new electricity generation, rewritten rules on the fly, and waged an all-out regulatory war on offshore wind farms. Electricity costs are rising nationwide, constraining essentially all power-dependent industries except artificial intelligence.

In short: The news hasn’t been good for the transition industries. But what’s notable in this report is that the job declines are not limited to these green industries. The first eight months of Donald Trump’s presidency have been more and more damaging for the blue collar fields and heavy industries that he promised to help.

For instance: Mining, quarrying, and oil extraction lost 6,000 jobs in August. These losses were led by the oil and gas industry, as well as mining support companies. Other industries — such as coal mining firms — saw essentially no growth or very slightly declines.

More cuts are likely to come soon for the fossil fuel industry. The oil giant ConocoPhillips says it will lay off about a quarter of its roughly 13,000-person workforce before the year is out. The oilfield services company Halliburton has also been shedding workers in recent weeks, according to Reuters. The West Texas benchmark oil price has lost nearly $10 since the year began, and is now hovering around $62. That’s roughly the average breakeven price for drilling new wells in the Permian Basin.

The manufacturing industry has lost 78,000 jobs since the year began. In the past month, it shed jobs almost as fast as the federal government, which has deliberately culled its workforce, as the economic analyst Mike Konczal observed.

This manufacturing weakness is also showing up in corporate earnings. John Deere, the American farm equipment maker, has seen its income degrade through the year. It estimates that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will cost the company $600 million in 2025, and it recently laid off several hundred workers in the Midwest.

Even industries that have previously shown some resilience — and that benefited from the AI boom — have started to stall out a bit. The utility industry lost about 1,000 jobs last month, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the new data. (At the same time, the number of non-managerial utility workers slightly increased.) The utility sector has still gained more than 6,000 jobs compared to a year ago.

A few months ago, I quipped that you could call President Trump “Degrowth Donald” because his tax and trade policies seemed intent on raising prices and killing the carbon-intensive sectors of the American economy. (Of course, Trump was doing plenty that radical climate activists didn’t want to see, too, and his anti-renewable campaign has only gotten worse.) Now we’re seeing the president’s anti-growth policies bear fruit. It was a joke then. Now it’s just sad.