The federal government will release the latest monthly jobs report Friday — but in the wake of President Donald Trump’s shock announcement Wednesday seeking to disrupt the global economy with broad tariffs on U.S. imports, the new labor market data for March will essentially end up reflecting a different era.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the survey at 8:30 a.m. ET. Estimates from Dow Jones showed forecasts for about 140,000 net new payrolls, compared with 151,000 previously, with the unemployment rate unchanged for the month at 4.1%.
That would still represent a relatively healthy round of hirings, despite large federal job cuts enacted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. According to a separate report released Thursday by the jobs and career consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, DOGE was responsible for about 216,000 reductions in the federal workforce. Challenger uses different data from the BLS to track job changes in the economy, so that number may not be picked up by the federal survey.
But if the general direction of the Challenger numbers is correct, it means that even before Trump’s Rose Garden speech this week, the economy was already showing a more significant slowdown that the new tariffs are likely to only aggravate.
“This month’s [jobs] report may take a back seat to the ongoing negotiations around tariff rates and the potential for escalating retaliatory tariffs from the US’s trading partners,” Matthew Weller, global head of research at FOREX.com, wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
He continued: “Focusing in purely on the labor market, even last month’s tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China are likely to have little impact on the March [jobs] reading yet, though there is some risk that we could start to see the leading edge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) job cuts filtering through.”
Analysts with Citi had an even lower forecast for net new jobs — 95,000, with the unemployment rate rising to 4.2%.
“This would primarily reflect low hiring at a time of year when hiring would start to pick-up,” they wrote in a note last week. “But this slowing would precede a period starting around May and continuing through the summer when weakness from low hiring could be augmented by federal job cuts and private sector spillover effects. Evidence that the economy is already starting to slow ahead of the larger downside risks has the Fed cutting rates again in May.”
Other jobs data released this week showed broad layoffs still remained subdued, but so did hiring.
But the March data are firmly in the rearview mirror for most analysts now that Trump has officially launched his effort to reorganize the U.S. economy.
“With recession fears mounting, a weaker-than-expected [jobs data point] could be a nail in the coffin for the US economy,” Barclays analysts said in a note Thursday.
“Unfortunately, a more encouraging reading could easily be dismissed as being ‘outdated’ given the prospect of significant tariffs hitting the US job market. In this context, it feels like this is a lose-lose situation for markets.”
