Whaddya wanna know about federal layoffs and this economy?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, we make you smarter by answering your pressing questions about this economy: Will cuts to the federal workforce make any difference to the unemployment rate? Also, have we all been totally oblivious to a private sector recession? (Spoiler: No!) We’ll explain. Plus, listeners sound off on smile-worthy moments from their week!
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “How Will Shrinking the Federal Workforce Impact the Labor Market?” from Wells Fargo
- “How DOGE cuts might show up in the data” by Axios
- “Unemployment is still low, but are private sector layoffs accelerating?” from Marketplace
- “Many laid-off government workers aren’t eligible for unemployment” from Marketplace
- “US Treasury’s Bessent vows to re-privatize an economy that is ‘brittle underneath’” by Reuters
- “ADP® National Employment Report” from ADP Research
- “Employment by industry, monthly changes” from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- “Governments at all levels are hiring, and that’s boosting the job market” by Marketplace
- “The Federal Reserve’s favorite recession indicator is flashing a danger sign again” from CNBC
Join us tomorrow for “Economics on Tap.” The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, I'm Kyle. |
| 0:06.4 | I'm Kyle. Rizzol. Welcome back to Make Me Smart. Where we make today makes sense. |
| 0:09.3 | Nova Sappho is here today because Kimberly's off Kimberlying. |
| 0:14.1 | Uh-huh. Which is nice. Is she back in Cuba? I don't know. I don't know. |
| 0:18.9 | Well, anyway, it's good to be back. Thanks everybody for joining us. It's Thursday, February 27th. |
| 0:24.1 | We are going to do some questions today and then top it off with a smile, courtesy of all y'all. |
| 0:30.3 | If you do have a question, you'd like us to answer in the days and weeks and months and years and decades to come, perhaps if this podcast is around |
| 0:37.8 | that long, don't know. You know how to reach us 508 UBSM-A-R-T, 508 U-B-Smart. |
| 0:43.8 | J.C. Bulls, first question, please. |
| 0:45.6 | This is Peter from Somerville, South Carolina. With the recent and future job cuts in the federal |
| 0:50.8 | workforce, will the unemployment rate be unaffected? Make me smart. Good question. |
| 0:56.2 | Very good question. And I'll take this one if that's right, Kai. So here's the deal. The |
| 1:01.8 | federal government employment makes up a relatively small portion of total payrolls in the United |
| 1:06.9 | States because the United States economy, the gross domestic product, is enormous. |
| 1:11.6 | It's $29.7 trillion. |
| 1:15.6 | We employ something around 160 million people in this country, and the federal government |
| 1:20.6 | employment makes up about 1.5% of that. |
| 1:23.6 | It's still a significant number. |
| 1:25.6 | It's the largest employer, but it's, you know, when you're |
| 1:29.3 | talking cuts in the potentially tens of thousands range so far, according to analysis that I got |
| 1:36.0 | this morning from Wells Fargo, the analysts there, kind of took a look at all that we've heard so |
| 1:41.5 | far, what agencies have reported, what news organizations have |
... |
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