Welcome to the NewsHour. The U.S. economy added a modest 50,000 jobs last month that was below

expectations and capped the weakest year for job growth since the pandemic. Employers added a total of

584,000 jobs in the U.S. for all of 2025, a big drop from the $2 million created in 2024.

Layoffs still remain low, hiring is still steady, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.4%. Today, President Trump said it was an

amazing report showing the strength of private hiring and said any overall weakness was due to the

government shutdown this past fall. But as economics correspondent,

Paul Salman reports, it all points to a soft job market that's adding 100,000 fewer jobs a month

compared to 2024.

2025 over. Headline for the job market? Job market's weak. The job market's not creating very many

jobs at all. Economist Mark Zandi. He says if you look back to the start of President Trump's

tariff regime, what the president called Liberation Day, the economy has not been able to create any

jobs. And the job growth we are getting very narrowly concentrated in

the health care sector, a bit in leisure hospitality, but outside of that, we're seeing job

loss and no job creation. In fact, just about all the new jobs created last month were in health

care, social assistance, and leisure and hospitality. No change or losses pretty much everywhere else.

Also in today's report, downward revisions to the jobs created in previous months.

Totally subtracted another close to 70,000 jobs from payrolls.

And this is not the end of it. There's a lot more revisions that are coming.

And everything suggests that they will show even weaker job market. So the job market since

last January? It came into the year doing quite well. A job, monthly job growth was 150, 175K.

But since the spring, Liberation Day, it's flatlined. There's been no job growth. Some

months up a little bit, some months down, essentially going nowhere fast. Especially because while

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