Last month “would’ve been a fairly quiet month for layoffs” in America.
Would’ve. Should’ve. Could’ve. Alas.
The quote’s from Andrew Challenger, who on Thursday said US job cut announcements soared 60% in March from February, to 275,240. That’s atop a 245% surge the prior month.
The chart, above, looks like Nvidia’s quarterly revenue two months into Jensen Huang’s “new industrial revolution” in mid-2023.
Measured against the same month in 2024, job cuts rose more than 200% in March. That’s saying something because, as you can see from the visual, March of 2024 witnessed the most announced cuts of any month last year.
If you’re wondering whether, and to what extent, Elon Musk and DOGE were to blame, I suppose I spoiled the suspense with the chart header, but Challenger drove it home. “Job cut announcements were dominated by DOGE plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” he said, adding that Trump tried to fire “tens of thousands of probationary employees” as well.
Note that hiring plans were impacted too, plunging 62% MoM. For Q1 as a whole, hiring plans summed to 53,867, down 16% YoY and the fewest for any Q1 since 2012.
I guess The White House — and a handful of shameless Wall Street strategists low-key shilling for Trump and cheerleading for Musk — would have you believe that’s somehow DeepSeek’s fault. And they’d presumably also suggest it’s a total coincidence that both hiring plans and CEO confidence dropped to the most subdued levels since 2012 during the very same month, a month which just happened to coincide with Trump’s escalating trade war.
At least Musk’s on his way out of the administration, allegedly. I’d quickly add — because I don’t want this to get lost — that Musk’s DOGE effort isn’t and wasn’t about cost-cutting. DOGE’s just Project 2025’s civil service purge and, less appreciated by Trump himself, a bid on Musk’s part to get a look at the systems which run the US government and also the data warehoused in those systems.
Meanwhile — and mercifully — initial jobless claims were benign in Thursday’s update, at 219,000. That’s a seven-week low. Continuing claims, though, rose the most in over a year, to 1.903 million, a new “since November of 2021” high.
