It’s jobs week in the US, and hiring probably held up in March.

That’s the view among economists, who’re always right. (Ba-dum-tss. I’ll be here all night, folks.)

Consensus expects 140,000, give or take, from the NFP headline. That’d mark a slight deceleration from the prior month’s pace, and with December’s big number dropping out of the lookback, the three-month average will fall meaningfully absent a blowout print for March (and/or big upside revisions to the January/February headlines).

Still, 140,000 would count as sturdy, or anyway sturdy enough to allay fears that a run of lackluster sentiment data’s poised to manifest as a brake-slam moment for the US economy.

Initial jobless claims continue to loiter at subdued levels, and although households have expressed some consternation about the outlook for the labor market going forward, there’s scant evidence to suggest a hard stop.

That said, the labor market’s a lagging indicator, and Donald Trump’s created a ton of uncertainty for businesses. In simple terms: It’s impossible for management teams to plan ahead when they have so little visibility into US trade policy. Unpredictable trade policy means supply chain ambiguity and as we saw during the pandemic, supply chain ambiguity is tantamount to chaos.

And then there’s DOGE, Elon Musk’s increasingly controversial effort to apply the management “principles” from his businesses to the US government, where those principles simply aren’t a good fit.

So far, attrition and layoffs attributable to the initiative aren’t material for the overall hiring picture, but as BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Vail Hartman pointed out, the impact’s visible if you know where to look. The figure below, from Lyngen, shows job applications started by federal workers on Indeed. The data’s indexed to January 2022.

Isolating for DOGE entails focusing on employees at USAID, CFPB, the USDA, the FAA and a few others. Last month, job applications from employees in those agencies rose sharply, and now sit 75% higher versus January 2022.

Eventually, if Musk keeps at it — and assuming the goal really is to cut federal payrolls as opposed to, say, giving Musk and his companies access to data on Americans and the software and systems of the US government — the effort will ripple out, as canceled government contracts manifest in lost jobs.

Trump needs the labor market to hold up. The “it’s just the soft data” excuse (i.e., the narrative that says the US economy’s fine if you don’t count depressed households and nervous businesses) is going to be tested in the weeks ahead, and indeed personal spending data released late last week was tepid.

“The key redeeming attribute of the current state of the US economy remains resilient labor market conditions,” BMO’s Lyngen said. “Despite flagging sentiment, consumers are likely to remain confident with current spending trends unless and until there is a material downshift in the jobs market.”

Right. Which is why it’s perilous to hack away indiscriminately at a huge employer of Americans (i.e., the federal government), particularly in cases where you have no plausible claim whatever on knowing what you’re doing. Politics aside — which is to say this is an apolitical question, or at least it can be — what makes Musk qualified to determine the “correct” number of, say, health care support staff for America’s veterans? What, exactly, is his expertise in that area? Or in food safety, to use another example? Here’s a Reuters headline from March 27: “FDA staff struggle to meet product review deadlines after DOGE layoffs.” Does that sound good to you?

Anyway, in addition to the jobs report, traders will get the full complement of NFP-week releases in the days ahead, including ADP private hiring (seen at 120,000), JOLTS, both ISM surveys (manufacturing’s seen printing in contraction territory at 49.5, services in expansion, at 53) and Challenger job cuts (that release last month showed a huge increase).

Overseas, Europe releases inflation data, and you can expect plenty of testy rhetoric around Trump’s auto tariffs, which went down like a lead balloon in Brussels.

On Wednesday, America will celebrate “Liberation Day.” It’s Trump’s take on a sales tax holiday. Instead of removing taxes on consumer purchases, he’s adding new ones in the form of tariffs. That sounds bad, but don’t worry, it’s for a good cause: It’s going to cost $4.5 trillion to keep taxes low for corporates and billionaires. Somebody’s gotta pay for that, and who better to foot the bill than Main Street, where no one knows any better?