Troubling and unusual unemployment numbers for Black Americans are signaling that the U.S. is on its way to a potential recession, economists tell TPM.
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed an increasingly negative employment situation for Black workers, one that has rapidly deteriorated over the last four months as a result of policy decisions from the Trump administration. But the relative lack of unemployment rate movement for every other racial group — and even a miniscule improvement over the same time period for white workers, means if conditions don’t change — this economic downturn could look different than the 2008 global financial crisis.
This time around, Black middle-class Americans are bearing the brunt of the initial impact “because the federal workforce is specifically being targeted,” Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Between May and August, the Black unemployment rate jumped from 6% to 7.5%. That’s the highest it’s been since 2021, and the highest Black unemployment rate outside of the COVID-related economic crisis since January 2018.
At the same time, white unemployment ticked down ever so slightly from 3.8% to 3.7%, while unemployment for Asians stayed flat at 3.6% and rose slightly for Hispanics from 5.1% to 5.3%. Experts clocked the dismal employment situation for Black people even before last week’s BLS data dropped, noting the impacts of federal government job cuts by the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency, and the Trump administration generally, on Black women employment. Combined with Trump’s legitimate threats to and attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion work within the public and private sectors, and the Supreme Court’s decisions weakening affirmative action, experts told TPM it’s not surprising that Black employment has taken such a hit. But it is an unnerving sign of where we are, and what’s to come.
“I’m one in general to be not alarmist,” Ajilore, said. “But I am really alarmed.”
The American Federation of Government Employees has tried to get racial data about workers who have been fired or accepted separation plans, “and they are just not giving us any of this information,” said AFGE spokesperson Brittany Holder. Holder pointed out that Black people make up more than 18% of federal workers, despite being only about 13% of the population.
Said Ajilore, Black people’s economic situations are often a barometer for the rest of the nation. If Black unemployment is up, that forecasts a potential economic downturn in general. But early job loss often hits low-wage workers first. It’s unique, Ajilore said, for the Black middle class to be impacted so sharply, and first.
It’s also unusual, said labor and race researcher Algernon Austin, to see such a dramatic spike in unemployment for just one group. During the pandemic-induced downturn, for instance, everyone was hit hard and fast. Over the months leading up to the 2008 recession, unemployment rates for white and Hispanic workers fluctuated more dramatically, even if not in lockstep, alongside that of Black workers, according to BLS data.
Four months into the steady rise in Black unemployment, that trend isn’t happening.
As the job market is getting worse (employers added just 22,000 new jobs in August compared to 142,000 at the same time last year), Black people appear to be trying to re-enter the labor force at higher levels than other racial groups. It sounds counterintuitive, but it could be a very early warning that people just need money.
“There is more economic hardship in Black America now than a year ago,” said Austin, who directs the Race and Economic Justice center at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “People have to pay their student loans again, the unemployment rate is going up, people are being laid off, wages are stagnating… Economic hardship can pull people who are not working into the labor force, either by leading them to get a job or simply to try to get a job.”
In response to a TPM inquiry, the White House touted Trump’s “America First” policy priorities.
“President Trump is committed to fostering an economy that creates opportunities for all Americans,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email. “His America First agenda has created more than half a million good-paying jobs in the private sector and American-born workers have accounted for all of those job gains since the President took office in January.”
Rogers also highlighted the “record-low” Black unemployment rate under the first Trump administration. Black unemployment did reach historic lows under Trump I before the pandemic hit, but it had been declining steadily under former President Obama’s two terms. And it declined more slowly during Trump’s first two years — from 7.5% in January 2018 to 6.4% in January 2020 — than during Obama’s final two years — from 10.3% in January 2015 to 7.5% in January 2017, according to BLS data.
The Republicans’ new megabill fans the flames, said Ajilore. By defunding large swaths of social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid and unemployment insurance, “what they’ve done is basically make that less useful so that if we do hit a downturn,” he said, those support systems are less available.
That safety net was already eroding. U.S. Census Bureau data measuring poverty between 2023 and 2024 found poverty rose slightly year over year. After pandemic-era boosts to programs like SNAP were clawed back by GOP legislators in 2023, the Census Bureau report found a now-familiar trend: Black people were harmed while everyone else’s situation remained relatively stagnant.
Black poverty jumped more than 2% between 2023 and 2024, while staying level for Hispanic, Indigenous, and white individuals.
A White House official said policies included in the hallmark Trump II megabill, like “no tax on overtime and on tips” (both of which come with income and industry limitations) will eventually benefit working-class families.
But Ajilore said this tax-and-spending bill, which further slashes social welfare programs to pay for permanent billionaire-boosting tax cuts and federal defense funding, will only exacerbate inequality.
“More people are going to fall through the cracks of the safety nets,” he said, “because they’ve created bigger cracks.”
