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Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 75,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in August. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals fell short of those expectations. CNBC News reported:

Job creation sputtered in August, adding to recent signs of labor market weakening and likely keeping the Federal Reserve on track for a widely anticipated interest rate cut later this month. Nonfarm payrolls increased by just 22,000 for the month, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday.

While the data from August was ugly, just as important were the revisions from June and July, which were down a combined 21,000 jobs compared with earlier, preliminary reporting. This included a rare negative month: The revisions showed the economy lost 13,000 in June.......

But as MSNBC’s Ali Velshi summarized, “Turns out firing the ref doesn’t change the score.”

Over the first eight months of 2025, the latest data suggests the economy has added 598,000 jobs. That might sound like a decent number, but over the first eight months of 2024 — when Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was over 1.1 million jobs, and over the first eight months of 2023, the U.S. economy added more than 1.8 million jobs.

In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first eight months of this year show the slowest job growth in the U.S. since 2009, when the economy was still hemorrhaging jobs from the Great Recession.

When trying to boast about the economy, the White House routinely references what it calls the “Trump Effect.” The latest job data, coupled with sluggish growth and stubborn inflation, suggests this “effect” simply isn’t working.

Indeed, the question the president and his team ought to face is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 16-year low?”