Trump Misleads on Jobs – FactCheck.org

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Following the release of the latest jobs report on March 7, President Donald Trump suggested that his administration — which has been in office since Jan. 20 — is responsible for significant job growth. The growth in February was steady, but to support his claims, Trump made several misleading statements about the economy he inherited.

The February jobs report delivered on expectations, saying that the economy added 151,000 jobs — slightly below the forecasted 160,000. The unemployment rate was 4.1%, up marginally from 4% in January.

Economists described the report as showing a generally steady labor market for now, with Brookings Institution fellow and University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers calling the report “splendidly dull.”

We’ll unpack three of the claims Trump made on March 7 during his remarks from the Oval Office about the report.

• The president compared the 9,000 new auto manufacturing jobs in February to a loss of more than 27,000 jobs in President Joe Biden’s last year — ignoring that there was a net gain of those jobs over Biden’s entire term. He also suggested that his tariff policy was responsible for the new jobs, but Trump’s tariffs had not yet been enacted in the period covered by the jobs report.

• He claimed to be “presiding over a brand-new domestic manufacturing boom after major collapse under Biden,” but an expert told us he’s been in office for too short of a time to have effected any major economic change. And the data show there was a net gain in manufacturing jobs during Biden’s administration.

• Trump cherry-picked data to misleadingly claim that “1 in every 4 jobs created in America was a government job” in Biden’s last two years as president, while “93% of all job gains” during the first full month of Trump’s second term “were in the private sector.” During Biden’s entire presidency, about 11% of the jobs added were government jobs, the vast majority of which were state and local government jobs.

Auto Manufacturing Jobs

Trump highlighted gains in auto manufacturing jobs, saying, “in a single month, 9,000 new auto jobs. You haven’t heard that in a long time. After autoworkers lost more than 27,000 auto jobs in the final year of Biden.”

Trump’s figures are correct, but over Biden’s entire term, auto manufacturing jobs went up.

While there hasn’t been monthly job growth since July, over Biden’s term, motor vehicle and parts jobs went up by 47,000. Employment in January was 9,900 higher than the pre-pandemic level in February 2020.

And while Trump claimed that before the February increase, there hadn’t been such a large one-month jump “in a long time,” there were larger one-month increases under Biden. The February jobs report showed an increase since January of 8,900 jobs in the manufacturing of motor vehicles and parts. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was an increase of 28,400 jobs in that sector between October and November 2023.

Also, just because the one-month increase happened while Trump is in office doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s responsible for it, Alan Tonelson, a longtime analyst of U.S. manufacturing policy who blogs at RealityChek, told us in a phone interview.

The kinds of decisions that result in jobs are long-term decisions, Tonelson said, using the example of new factories, which take time to build.

Trump, though, claimed that his tariff policies had already affected the February job numbers. He said the reason for the one-month gain was “largely” because car companies “think things are happening, so they’re already geared up. In some cases, they had rooms in their plants, or they had empty plants that they were able to put into use quickly because they see — because of the tariffs. They don’t want to be dealing with other places,” he said, mentioning Mexico and Canada.

When we asked the White House about the president’s claim, it provided examples of auto companies making announcements about new plants or production. But most of the plans began before Trump took office, and it’s unclear if any of them led to new jobs in February.

The White House pointed to production at a Georgia Hyundai plant. Construction of the vehicle and battery manufacturing plant was announced in 2022, and it began producing electric cars in October. However, the CEO, José Muñoz, has pointed to Hyundai’s investment in U.S. production over the last few years as insulation from potential tariffs from the Trump administration.

The White House also pointed to two announcements of plants opening — for electric batteries and electric vehicles — but the projects were in the works well before Trump’s election.

It also cited a $1.5 million Michigan Economic Development Program grant that is anticipated to create 144 jobs manufacturing hydrogen fuel cells and plans for a Chicago-area assembly plant to reopen in 2027. Plans to reopen the assembly plant were announced shortly after the company’s chairman met with Trump and months after a pressure campaign from the United Auto Workers. But neither of those projects has produced jobs yet.

And the White House pointed to the same March 3 Reuters story that the president appeared to reference in his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, when he said that Honda had announced it would build a new plant in Indiana. But after that address, Honda told a news station in Indianapolis: “Honda has made no such announcement and will not comment on this report. The Honda Civic has been made in our Indiana Auto Plant since the facility opened in 2008 based on our longstanding approach to build products close to the customer. We have the flexibility to produce products in each region based on customer needs and market conditions.”

So, it’s unclear if Honda is planning to change its Indiana operations due to tariffs, but no jobs associated with any potential change would have been included in the February report, either.

It remains to be seen what impact Trump’s tariff policies might have on the auto industry. So far, 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel imports went into effect on March 12, with the EU and Canada immediately implementing retaliatory tariffs. Broad 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, including on vehicles, are largely on hold until April 2.

Some industry watchers have been skeptical of the benefits from tariffs for the auto industry. “Ultimately, in a global automotive business that relies on a large and complicated supply chain, higher tariffs will only challenge further an industry already wrestling with high costs and small margins,” Cox Automotive wrote in an early February analysis.

Manufacturing Jobs

The president also said, “Our administration is presiding over a brand-new domestic manufacturing boom after major collapse under Biden.”

But the data don’t support that claim.

Trump said, “During the last year, the Biden administration saw a loss of more than 110,000 manufacturing jobs. … During the first full month in office, we’ve not only stopped that manufacturing collapse, but we’ve begun to rapidly reverse it and get major gains. We created 10,000 manufacturing jobs in February alone. That hasn’t happened in a long time.”

There was a 20,000 gain in manufacturing jobs in November, so it has only been a few months since there has been such a one-month increase.

Trump is correct about the net loss over Biden’s last year — it was 111,000 — but again, over Biden’s four years, manufacturing jobs went up by 610,000. In January, there were almost 12.8 million manufacturing jobs, 12,000 more than in February 2020, before the pandemic.

Factory construction also reached the highest level in more than 50 years in 2024, according to a report from Moody’s Analytics.

Forbes wrote last year that Biden-era policies, including the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act, “spurred an influx of foreign direct investment and a surge in factory construction. But the anticipated jobs have taken a while to materialize in great numbers and will not arrive until after his presidency ends.”

When Trump touted the “brand-new domestic manufacturing boom,” he said that it had been “confirmed” by the ISM and S&P manufacturing surveys, which are conducted by private companies that survey purchasing managers to provide an indicator of economic conditions.

The surveys did report expansion in manufacturing.

The S&P survey reported that “February survey data indicated an acceleration in the rate of US manufacturing sector expansion.” However, it said there was “some evidence” that the growth was “partially driven by advanced purchases ahead of likely price increases and possible supply disruption related to further tariff impositions in the coming months.”

The ISM for February said that the sector “expanded for the second month in a row in February after 26 consecutive months of contraction.” Many survey respondents reporting uncertainty and volatility due to tariffs.

“Manufacturing, generally speaking, is cyclical,” Tonelson said. “Manufacturing is quite export heavy,” so it depends on what’s happening in other countries, too.

But, overall, Tonelson said, “I don’t think that one can make any reasonable conclusion about booming of anything after just about a month and a half. In terms of manufacturing jobs, we’ve only got one month of data on President Trump’s watch this time.”

Public vs. Private Jobs

Trump also used cherry-picked statistics when comparing government and private-sector jobs added under him and Biden.

“Under the final two years of Biden, 1 in every 4 jobs created in America was a government job. That’s a tremendous percentage,” he said. “But under the first full month of President Trump, which we haven’t even gotten started yet, an incredible 93% of all job gains were in the private sector.”

It’s true that about one-quarter, or roughly 26%, of the jobs added in Biden’s last two years in office were government jobs, which includes positions in federal, state and local government. However, during Biden’s entire presidency, about 11% of the jobs added were government jobs — including some jobs that were lost, but quickly regained, during the pandemic. And about 9 in 10 of the government jobs gained were at the state and local level, which Biden had no direct say in.

Measuring from June 2022, when total employment finally surpassed the pre-pandemic high in February 2020, about 22% of the increase in employment was government jobs. Again, roughly 90% of the jobs were in state and local government.

It’s also misleading to compare one month of private-sector job growth at the start of Trump’s second term — about 93% of the jobs gained in February were private-sector jobs, as Trump said — to a much longer period under Biden.

For instance, in December, one of Biden’s final months in office, only 11% of all jobs added were government jobs. A month before that in November, it was about 6.5%. There were also a few months during Biden’s last two years in office when there was an increase in total jobs but a decline in government jobs.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102.