Donald Trump can’t create enough fake jobs for underperforming Cabinet Secretaries to make up for the slump in job growth that has taken place under his second watch. The only thing keeping us out of a full jobs recession is health care:
In the last 12 months, “we created 436,000 jobs in the health care sector,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That’s 121% of all the jobs added from January 2025 to January 2026.
The math makes sense because growth in health care, as well as the related category of social assistance — which added 320,000 jobs — made up for employment losses in other sectors.
“There’s not much growth anywhere else,” said Baker. “Federal government lost a lot of jobs, manufacturing lost jobs, scientific research lost jobs. Summing those together, over 100,000 jobs were lost” [Mitchell Hartman, “Health Care Is Where the Jobs Are,” Marketplace, 2026.03.05].
We can blame Trump for policy failure in each of those job-loss sectors. Trump and Elon Musk have slashed useful public service jobs. Trump has slashed funding for scientific research. Trump touted tariffs as a way to rebuild manufacturing, but tariffs crushed manufacturing in his first term and are having the same effect now. Trump policies leave us in an economy where our only hope is that we keep getting older and sicker and that we can continue to afford doctors and nurses and pills.
But Trump may “cure” health care job growth the way he’s “cured” job growth in other sectors:
The fact that the government drives a lot of health care spending — through Medicare and Medicaid coverage and reimbursements, and Obamacare subsidies — makes the sector vulnerable to fiscal shocks, said Dean Baker.
“You do worry when so much of the labor market is dependent on one sector,” he said. “We could get President Trump and Congress deciding, ‘OK, we want to spend less on health care.’ And we’d see a lot of this job growth at least slow, if not stop” [Hartman, 2026.03.05].
Elimination of thousands of Veterans Administration healthcare jobs, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare outpacing rural health grants, restrictions on student loans for nurses… Trump is already sandbagging that one bright spot in an otherwise lackluster labor market.
Firing Trump and his Cabinet would briefly exacerbate unemployment… but looking at job growth now, I suspect we’d quickly recover from a change in management.
Republican Presidents haven’t help create jobs since forever. People still trust that they do a better job economically. Its a conundrum. Talk about it more Democrats, facts are on your side. Republicans are good liars.
A surge of over 1,000 U.S.-trained nurses has moved to Canada—specifically British Columbia—since April 2025, driven by a desire for better working conditions,, universal health care, and a rejection of U.S. political, instability. This trend is fueled by, streamlined licensing,, high demand,, and recruitment efforts targeting American professionals facing, burnout.
Januarys great jobs report of 130k new jobs was revised down to 11k.
Non farm payrolls dropped 92k in February., Unemployment up to 4.4% from 4.3%. Dow dropped another 900 points.