I should say a few more words about Wednesday’s update on job openings across the US economy. So I will.

Bear with me. This isn’t as boring as it sounds, and even if it is, I’ll keep it brief.

Recall from June payrolls (i.e., the hiring update prior to the release which cost Erika McEntarfer her job) that according to the preliminary tally for that month, hiring in state and local government outstripped private sector hiring (all private sector hiring) for only the fourth time in years.

Although private hiring rebounded in July, June’s already underwhelming advance was revised away entirely to show next to no private sector hiring on net. That’s ominous and it’s also somewhat amusing in the context of the Trump administration’s determination to “re-privatize” the US economy.

When assessing the hiring impulse, some economists and bank strategists tend to discount not only government hiring, but also health care and social assistance, not necessarily because those aren’t valuable jobs, but rather because they’re acyclical. Note the emphasis, I’ll come back to it very shortly.

The figure below shows the combined monthly change in job openings for health care and social assistance as well as the change in vacancies for positions in state and local government.

The dashed yellow line is the rolling two-month change in those openings.

The takeaway: Between June and July, vacancies across health care, social assistance and government at the state and local level, dropped by a combined 455,000, the most for any two-month rolling period in the history of the BLS’s dataset.

If that was the only hiring keeping the train on the tracks, we may be in trouble.

Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro, seems to agree. “These acyclical parts of the jobs market have been the areas lifting employment growth the most,” he said Wednesday. “If you lose [those] areas, you don’t really have much else to keep payroll growth with a plus sign in front of it.”