“America’s Job Market Has Entered the Slow Lane,” reads a recent Wall Street Journal headline. Most of the mainstream media echoes this interpretation, but the reality is much better than the headlines suggest. Indeed, the latest employment data is robust, with jobs going to Americans in the private sector and wages rising faster than prices.
There’s a lot to celebrate in the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report for December, from who is getting jobs to the kinds of jobs being created, as well as how much people are getting paid.
For example, native-born employment rose by more than two million in 2025, while the number of foreign-born workers with jobs increased by less than 400,000. This was the best December on record for the number of native-born Americans with jobs. It’s especially important that we’re seeing this positive change from where we were trending previously.
During nearly the entire final year of the Biden administration, the annual change in native-born employment was negative, meaning Americans were losing jobs. All the supposed job growth during that time was going to foreign-born workers, a category which even the Biden Labor Department had to admit contained an unknown number of illegal aliens.
It’s no exaggeration to say that President Donald Trump is returning the American labor market to the American people.
In terms of the number of jobs added in December, the monthly survey of businesses showed an increase of just 50,000, but the survey of households showed the number of people employed jumped by 232,000. There’s an explanation for this difference if we dig further into the report, and it indicates a very positive development in the labor market.
The number of multiple jobholders plunged by 444,000 last month, the second-largest drop since the government-imposed Covid lockdowns. Simultaneously in December, the number of part-time jobs declined by 740,000 while full-time employment shot up by 890,000.
A holistic view of these various labor market data paints a positive picture. People were exchanging multiple part-time gigs for a single full-time job in December. It may not show up in certain aggregate figures, but individuals were improving.
Let’s say someone quits three of those part-time jobs and replaces them all with a single full-time one. That’s a net reduction of two payrolls, so it reduces the headline jobs number even though the person is better off. This is very likely the dynamic that was at play last month, hence the number of people employed rose more than four times faster than the number of jobs.
It’s the opposite of what happened in many months during the Biden years. When inflation spawned a cost-of-living crisis, many Americans had to take on a second, or even a third, job to make ends meet. That increased the headline jobs figure, all while folks’ finances deteriorated.
There’s more good news in terms of where jobs are being created. All the net job growth in 2025 came from the productive private sector, while government jobs declined, due entirely to federal layoffs. It’s a positive development, but it drags down the headline jobs number.
The job cuts to the bureaucracy in Washington, DC, resulted in a net decrease of 277,000 payrolls from January of 2025, when Mr. Trump took office, through December. This is the smallest the federal workforce has been since 2014, which is great for America. People are moving out of the unproductive public sector and into the productive private sector -- the opposite of the Biden years.
Lastly, there’s good news on the wage front, where earnings are rising faster than prices. That’s important because it means not only are people’s paychecks getting bigger, but that those paychecks can buy more. Inflation-adjusted (real) weekly paychecks are up about 1.5 percent under Mr. Trump’s second term, after they fell 4 percent under Joe Biden.
So, despite all the naysayers, Trump’s first year back at the helm saw a labor market undergo badly needed structural changes that are making Americans better off. The damage left by the Biden administration isn’t all gone, but we’re heading in the right direction.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist and the Richard Aster fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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