I’ll start with the good news. Job cuts halved in the US last month versus November, an updated tally released on Thursday showed.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 35,553 layoff announcements for December, a month during which such plans are typically subdued.

The headline represented an 8% decline versus December of 2024. It was just the fourth month during 2025 when job cuts fell compared to the prior year.

As the figure shows, December’s count was also the lowest since July of 2024.

“The year closed with the fewest announced layoff plans all year,” Andy Challenger remarked, in the editorial accompanying the release. “While December is typically slow, this coupled with higher hiring plans, is a positive sign after a year of high job cutting plans.”

Yes, “a year of high job cutting plans.” That brings us to the bad news: 2025 counted among the worst years for announced layoffs in decades.

There’s the chart. For the year, employers announced more than 1.2 million job cuts, the most since 2020 and, before that, the financial crisis.

Note that half of 2025’s cuts came during February, March and April, which is to say even if I wasn’t inclined to blame Donald Trump and Elon Musk (I am so inclined), I’d be compelled to concede the obvious: It was absolutely their fault. DOGE was directly responsible for nearly 300,000 cuts across federal payrolls and government contractors.

Although tariffs were explicitly cited for just 7,900 cuts, my guess is that uncertainty related to the levies was behind quite a few more layoff announcements. The same’s probably true for the generalized sense of angst the Trump administration succeeded in instilling across the economy.

AI took the blame for nearly 55,000 cuts in 2025. Technology was the leader in private-sector layoffs at almost 155,000. Challenger cited both AI and over-hiring during previous years for the 15% increase in tech-sector job losses.

On the bright side, and as ol’ Andy alluded to in his editorial, hiring plans bounced back in December at 10,500, the highest for any December since 2022. And yet…. well, have a look:

For the full year, hiring plans were just 507,647. That’s the fewest in quite a long time.

Ultimately, then, Thursday’s release suggested that although things are looking up, or at least looking better, 2025 was nevertheless a very bad year for layoffs and hiring plans.

[Insert your favorite “golden age” joke.]