Healthcare employment increased 82,000 [in January 2026], the most since July 2020, spread across ambulatory healthcare services, hospitals, nursing and residential care facilities. The job gains were well above the monthly ​average of 33,000 in 2025, leading some economists to conclude that January's increase was a fluke. Social assistance payrolls ​increased 42,000.

In the summer of 2022, Democrats in Congress were racing to pass the biggest climate law in the country’s history. But behind the scenes, four Trump administration veterans were plotting to obliterate federal climate efforts once Republicans regained control in Washington, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the matter.
Two of them, Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, drafted executive orders for the next Republican president to dismantle climate initiatives. The other two collected an “arsenal of information” to chip away at the scientific consensus that the planet is warming.
The overwhelming majority of scientists around the world agree that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet and supercharging storms, droughts, heat waves and sea level rise, directly contradicting the four conservatives.
Their efforts are now paying off: the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to revoke a determination that has underpinned the federal government’s ability to fight global warming since 2009. That scientific conclusion, known as the endangerment finding, determined that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. It required the federal government to regulate these gases, which result from the burning of oil, gas and coal.
In revoking that determination, the Trump administration would erase limits on greenhouse gases from cars, power plants and industries that generate the planet-warming pollution. “We are pretty close to total victory,” said Myron Ebell, who helped the first Trump administration set up its operations at the E.P.A. and has been attacking climate science and policies for nearly three decades.
“No amount of outside public support would have done anything if there hadn’t been those four people: Russ and Jeff and John and Mandy,” he said.
Still, some conservative activists who insisted that the threat of climate change was overblown kept up the fight during the Biden years. One of them was Ms. Gunasekara, who served as E.P.A. chief of staff during Mr. Trump’s first term and wrote the E.P.A. chapter in Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation eventually agreed to fund some of this work, although it is unclear whether the group provided the full $2 million, according to two people familiar with the matter. Ms. Gunasekara said in a text message that she was “extremely proud of the work I and others produced at the Heritage Foundation to rebut junk science and expose the Green New Scam.”
In 2022, under Mr. Vought’s supervision, Mr. Clark drafted executive orders that a future president could use to swiftly scrap Mr. Biden’s climate policies, according to two people familiar with the matter. He also brainstormed legal arguments that the future administration could use to repeal the endangerment finding.
Mr. Clark has called climate initiatives part of a plot to “control” Americans” and to undermine the U.S. economy. He has called environmentalists a “crazy climate cult. He is “an ideologue with very, very strong views that E.P.A. shouldn’t regulate greenhouse gases,” said a professor of environmental law at Harvard Law School.
At the time that he was hired by Mr. Vought, Mr. Clark was facing a criminal investigation in connection with Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. President Trump preemptively pardoned Mr. Clark in November and the Georgia case was dismissed. With Mr. Trump’s return to the White House last year, Mr. Clark became the government’s top regulatory official as the acting head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Mr. Vought is once again the White House budget director and Mr. Clark’s boss.
A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declined to make Mr. Clark available for an interview or respond to questions about his work. She said in a statement that Trump administration officials were “working in lock step to execute on the president’s deregulation agenda.”
Neil Chatterjee, a Republican who led the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the first Trump administration, said conservative activists had helped sustain the fight against the endangerment finding even after businesses backed out. “It’s not the corporate interests,” Mr. Chatterjee said, adding, “It’s the pure ideological activists who believe that climate change is a hoax, who believe that this was about transferring wealth and driving socialism and destroying renewable energy and promoting left-wing ideology.”
“This is their moment,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

Job growth over the past two years was far weaker than previously believed: U.S. employers added just 181,000 jobs last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Wednesday. That was 69 percent fewer jobs than its initial estimate of 584,000. The agency also lowered its estimate of job growth in 2024 by nearly 28 percent. In total, the U.S. economy has more than a million fewer jobs than previously reported.
The revisions are part of a longstanding annual process in which the B.L.S. reconciles its monthly estimates of job growth, which are derived from surveys, with less timely but more reliable data from state governments. In the past, the so-called benchmark revisions have typically been small and attracted relatively little attention. But the 2024 adjustment was the biggest in years, reducing estimated job growth by nearly 600,000. This year’s revision was even bigger, the largest since 2009 in percentage terms.
The new data makes even more pronounced the “low hire, low fire” stasis that has characterized the labor market for much of the past two years. The revisions didn’t affect the unemployment rate, which ticked down to 4.3 percent in January. But they suggest that job growth ground nearly to a halt last year, making it hard for anyone without a job to find one. “We’ve been hearing from workers that the job market is not working for them for some time,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at the employment site Glassdoor. “The anecdotes are starting to align with the data.”
The revisions also underscore how dependent the job market has become on hiring in the health care sector. Before the revisions, health care accounted for about 405,000 of the 584,000 jobs added in 2025, or nearly 70 percent of the gains. According to the latest data, health care companies added 391,000 jobs, while employment in other sectors fell by a combined 210,000 jobs. “That really puts into sharp relief how poorly other industries are doing even as health care continues to grow,” Mr. Zhao said.
The consecutive large revisions have led some economists to question the reliability of the survey-based monthly estimates. In December, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said economists at the central bank estimated that the B.L.S. has been overstating employment gains by about 60,000 jobs per month — a figure that, if accurate, would suggest that employers were cutting payrolls for much of last year.
The revisions have become a political issue. President Trump pointed to the previous big adjustment when he fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the statistical agency, last summer, saying it showed she was incompetent and biased against him. Experts across the ideological spectrum rejected those accusations, noting that there was no consistent political pattern in the revisions. Rather, they said, the large revisions highlighted the challenge of accurately measuring the economy during a period of falling survey response rates and changing employment patterns. Those challenges have been exacerbated by budget cuts and staff turnover, problems that predated Mr. Trump but have grown worse since he returned to office.
“I think we need to be more skeptical” about the monthly employment estimates, said Guy Berger, a labor economist who follows the numbers closely. He said he remains confident that the estimates are free from political bias. But the large revisions suggest the B.L.S. is struggling to get an accurate read on the state of the labor market. “You can trust that folks are trying to measure this accurately,” he said. But, he added, “I don’t think you can put a lot of weight on the specific monthly numbers.”
But Jed Kolko, an economist who oversaw economic data at the Commerce Department during the Biden administration, said the statistical agencies have faced a particularly challenging period in recent years. “Revisions tend to be bigger when the economy is changing rapidly,” he wrote in an email. “Job growth has been unusually volatile for several years, first from the pandemic and then from the immigration surge, so revisions in recent years have been bigger.”
One possible — though partial — explanation for the recent downward revisions relates to the way government statistics account for jobs created by newly started companies and destroyed by ones that go out of business. Such employers aren’t included in the monthly jobs survey, so the B.L.S. estimates their impact based on historical patterns, using a statistical method known as the “birth-death model.”
That approach can’t always keep up with changes in the economy, however. During the coronavirus pandemic, Americans started new businesses in record numbers. More recently, job gains at new businesses have slowed. But it can take time for such shifts to show up in economic models. The B.L.S. last year said that it would change the birth-death model to be more responsive to shifts in the labor market. That should lead to smaller revisions in the future. But it could also make the initial monthly estimates more volatile and harder to interpret.
The birth-death model accounted for only a fraction of the big revisions in 2024 and 2025, however. That suggests the updated method won’t fully resolve the recent issues with the monthly estimates. Doubts about the government’s data have led some economists in recent months to give renewed attention to alternative estimates from private sources such as ADP, the payroll processor. But those sources are less comprehensive than the official statistics, and often rely on government data to calibrate their models.
Private data isn’t immune from revisions of its own. ADP last week updated its job estimates to align them with government data, a process similar to the B.L.S.’s annual benchmarking procedure. The revision reduced ADP’s estimate of private-sector job growth in 2025 by more than a third, and made substantial changes to the company’s figures as far back as 2020.

Investors are becoming increasingly discerning regarding AI’s actual impact on the bottom line, which was clearly visible yesterday: while Software climbed 3.3%, the S&P Composite 1500 Insurance Brokers sub-industry suffered its steepest decline since March 2020, plummeting 9% following the release of a new ChatGPT-integrated AI insurance app that threatens to disrupt the traditional brokerage model. Insurance Brokers have already been under pressure before yesterday, having underperformed their industry, their sector, and the broad market by a wide margin since the end of 2024.

WESLACO, Texas—At Monte Cielo, a new housing development in this growing region of South Texas, half-built homes are sitting empty. The quiet scene comes after federal immigration agents have hit the development repeatedly, carrying out at least half a dozen raids there in recent months, builders said. The most recent was a few weeks ago.
The result? Homes are months behind schedule, and contractors face an uphill battle to recruit more workers to finish them. The situation is becoming familiar across the Rio Grande Valley, where trade groups are raising alarms about aggressive immigration enforcement wreaking economic havoc. Construction delays threaten higher prices for buyers and lower margins for builders. Materials suppliers are laying off employees.
“They are basically taking everyone in there working, whether they have proper documentation or not,” said Mario Guerrero, chief executive of the South Texas Builders Association. Guerrero added that he voted for President Trump, along with most of the region, and supports deportations of criminals, but “when you are terrorizing jobsites, people are afraid to go to work.”
South Texas is a heightened example of what contractors are facing across the country in areas where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has intensified. Home builders in Minnesota relayed similar experiences of raids picking up whole work crews, even those with legal documentation. Nationally, a third of commercial contractors reported being affected by immigration-enforcement actions in the past six months, according to a January report by trade group Associated General Contractors of America.
The situation here highlights how two of Trump’s priorities—curbing illegal immigration and strengthening the economy—can come into conflict with one another. Hidalgo County, which comprises some 22 cities including Weslaco, McAllen and Mission, is growing at twice the rate of the U.S. as a whole, according to census data, from 870,000 people in 2020 to 915,000 people in 2025. McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, a Republican, said he is concerned about the raids raising home prices and putting a damper on new business investment.
In 2024, immigrants—both with and without legal status—accounted for more than half of construction-trade workers in Texas, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, according to a senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Builders said that is much higher in the Rio Grande Valley. Moreover, the raids occurring now are netting not only immigrants in the country illegally, but also those with legal authorization, builders said.
Because of that, people are afraid to work whether they have legal authorization or not, a reality that has hit the industry and broader regional economy hard. Paul Rodriguez, CEO of Valley Land Title, estimated that residential construction activity fell 30% in recent months in Hidalgo County.
A large regional concrete supplier saw concrete use fall 60% between late May and November as home builders lost workers and were unable to move forward with construction. The company had to lay off 60 of its 150 workers. The company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in December, citing the drop in demand coinciding with immigration raids.
At a local tile supplier, the ICE crackdown has resulted in $5.3 million in lost sales. The company has laid off two drivers and four sales representatives and reduced hours for most of the remaining 39 employees, the first layoffs in the company’s history. Pallets that should have been picked up within 24 hours have now been sitting in his parking lot for months. The company took out a $1.3 million credit line to pay for tile that contractors ordered but never picked up because they couldn’t find workers. Two crews of installers, who previously spent their time upgrading the company’s four showrooms, now install tiles for customers who can’t find workers.
Johnny Vasquez, executive officer of the Rio Grande Valley Builders Association, observing flaws in newly lain sidewalk, said that the immigration raids are leading to poor quality of work because workers with decades of experience are arrested and contractors scramble for inexperienced replacements. Contractors face an uphill battle to recruit more workers to finish houses: looking at a framed house with materials stacked on the roof and no workers in sight, Vasquez ticked off the people affected, from lenders and smaller contractors to home buyers.
“If nobody comes back to finish out this house, a lot of people are going to lose out,” he said.