Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) finally released the employment data collected in September. Delayed more than six weeks by the government shutdown, these data are the last snapshot of the economy before the costly shutdown shuttered Head Start centers, reduced food assistance and more.
Today’s data show a dramatically slowing economy that has lost jobs two of the last four months. Cuts to the federal workforce, a sector which has lost 97,000 jobs since the start of the Trump administration are contributing to this downturn. Losses in transportation and warehousing, which are especially impacted by tariff policies, have also played a role.
Women’s jobs have fared somewhat better overall in 2025, buoyed by more than 400,000 jobs gained in the women-dominated private education and health care sector since January. But this respite may be short lived, as hospitals and clinics have started to close due to cuts to health care funding in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.
The data also show alarming developments in Black women’s employment. The unemployment rate for Black women skyrocketed to 7.5 percent in September, driven by them joining the labor market but not finding jobs. This means that, compared to January 2025, there are 265,000 fewer Black women working in September, driving their employment-to-population ratio down to 57.2 percent and returning it to a four-year low.
These data continue the worsening trends in Black women’s employment in recent years that economist Valerie Wilson has documented. These developments should concern all of us since, as Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman notes, Black women “are really…the best economic indicator for what’s coming next” for the economy as a whole. And our recent analysis underscores the particular impacts of the economy on Black mothers with young children: Black mothers have seen the steepest declines in labor force participation since rates for mothers of young children peaked in late 2023.
The new jobs data are not the only concerning economic data we’ve seen this fall. We also analyzed the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers and found that women’s rating of the government’s economic policies has reached the lowest level in nearly 50 years of surveys. Women’s sentiment towards the government’s economic policy cratered just months into the Trump Administration – and once again hit rock bottom in September. And while men’s ratings have declined over this same time period, women’s sentiment has plummeted further.
The jobs data, which were collected and processed prior to the shutdown, are the last normal jobs day data we will see for some time. That’s because no BLS data were collected during the shutdown – including one of the key jobs day surveys, the Current Population Survey (used to calculate unemployment data and other labor force metrics), breaking a 900-month streak of data collection. The BLS has just announced they cannot retroactively collect this survey data for October 2025, creating a permanent gap in the data and leaving businesses and policymakers without essential information they use to make decisions that impact hiring, investments, mortgage rates and more.
These delayed data make clear the economy is sliding towards disaster as the impacts of chaotic tariff policies and cuts to public services are increasingly felt. And the harm of these policies will be magnified as the effects of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill come to fruition, decimating health care funding, unspooling safeguards in the financial sector, giving tax breaks to the ultrawealthy and more.
