This morning’s jobs report confirmed it: The labor market is sputtering. The U.S. added 22,000 jobs in August, well below the number forecasters expected. Revised estimates also now show the economy lost jobs in June, the first negative number since December 2020, when Covid was still raging.

After last month’s poor jobs data, President Trump dismissed the numbers as “rigged” and fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But today’s results were no less disappointing, undercutting the president’s claims that the economy is booming. Many analysts believe that Trump’s tariff and immigration policies are largely to blame for the lackluster numbers.

Since January, employers have added fewer jobs than in any year since 2010, when the U.S. was emerging from a financial crisis.

The slowdown all but assures that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates, as Trump has been demanding, when it meets later this month. The president did not respond substantively to the jobs report but wrote on Truth Social: “Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should have lowered rates long ago.”

Watch: In this video, our economics reporter Lydia DePillis puts the new numbers in context.