Somebody’s fired. Again.

If Donald Trump was trying to send a message to the BLS rank and file by firing the head of America’s preeminent macroeconomic statistics agency, Erika McEntarfer’s subordinates didn’t get the memo. Or else didn’t care. Because Friday’s jobs report was quite weak.

Headline hiring printed just 22,000 for August, nowhere near the 75,000 consensus. Although the revisions weren’t a total disaster (like they were last month), they weren’t good either. July’s headline was revised marginally higher, but June was revised to show a net decline.

Do note: As initially reported, June’s headline was 147,000. In the revisions which cost McEntarfer her job, that tally was revised to show a mere 14,000 gain. On Friday, the second revision for June erased 27,000 more jobs from that month’s hiring.

Trump might quibble with this — keen as he is to lean against incontrovertible facts and deny axiomatic truths — but math dictates that subtracting 27,000 from 14,000 produces a negative number.

And, so, June 2025 now stands as the first month since December of 2020 when the NFP headline printed in negative territory. I’ll make the obvious joke (because how could I not?): The last time NFP was negative, Donald Trump was president. Ba-dum-tss.

The cumulative June revision — from +147,000 as initially reported to -13,000 in the final tally — will raise even more questions about data quality. While you could argue Friday’s release testifies to the BLS’s determination to remain independent of The White House, the dark irony is that the bureau may now come under even more pressure.

As to the details of the August report, private payrolls rose 38,000, which is to say they accounted for all of the hiring and then some. That’s good news at the margins, but before you suggest it’s evidence that the Trump administration’s making good on its promise to “re-privatize” the US economy, do note that consensus expected twice as many job additions from private employers in August.

The only sectors to add a meaningful number of jobs were leisure and hospitality and healthcare. Social assistance chipped in too. Everything else was pretty much a bust. Manufacturing shed 12,000 jobs. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% MoM and 3.7% YoY, in line with estimates.

On the household survey, the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, as expected. That’s the highest since October of 2021.

The participation rate ticked up to 62.3% from 62.2% in July. That’s not a large enough increase to take the edge off the higher jobless rate.

For whatever it’s worth (not a lot in the context of this release), the household survey showed a 288,000 gain for the overall employment level. Suffice to say exactly no one will care about that on Friday.

There are ways this release could’ve been worse. It doesn’t count as a total debacle. And, when considered with the rest of this week’s US labor market indicators — the JOLTS undershoot, the ADP miss, rising jobless claims, a disconcerting Challenger report and another poor showing for the services-side ISM employment gauge — you could easily argue Friday’s BLS numbers matched the informal, rational consensus, if not the official, economist consensus.

If you’re Trump, the bright side to this otherwise unfortunate hiring snapshot is that it chisels an already guaranteed September rate cut in stone. Nothing — literally nothing — can stop the FOMC from cutting now. Friday’s jobs report rendered next week’s inflation update almost irrelevant, at least for the September FOMC discussion.

Indeed, this week’s labor market data, taken together, makes a somewhat strong case for a 50bps Fed cut. It’s not far-fetched to suggest that Chris Waller and Stephen Miran may dissent in favor of a half-point reduction later this month, particularly considering Waller wanted to start cutting in July.