Initial claims fell but continued claims rose. Due to DOGE, both will soon surge.
Today, the US Department of Labor released Unemployment Claims for the week ending March 1.
Initial Unemployment Claims
- In the week ending March 1, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 221,000, a decrease of 21,000 from the previous week’s unrevised level of 242,000.
- The 4-week moving average was 224,250, an increase of 250 from the previous week’s unrevised average of 224,000.
Initial Claims and 4-Week Average
Continued Unemployment Claims
Continued Claims
- The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 1.2 percent for the week ending February 22, unchanged from the previous week’s unrevised rate. The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending February 22 was 1,897,000, an increase of 42,000 from the previous week’s revised level.
- The previous week’s level was revised down by 7,000 from 1,862,000 to 1,855,000. The 4-week moving average was 1,866,000, an increase of 2,750 from the previous week’s revised average. The previous week’s average was revised down by 1,750 from 1,865,000 to 1,863,250.
DOGE Impact on Claims
- Initial claims for UI benefits filed by former Federal civilian employees totaled 1,634 in the week ending February 22, an increase of 1,020 from the prior week.
- There were 7,412 continued weeks claimed filed by former Federal civilian employees the week ending February 15, a decrease of 200 from the previous week.
Expect these numbers to get much worse.
How Will 77,000 DOGE Terminations Impact Unemployment and Jobs?
On February 20, I addressed the question How Will 77,000 DOGE Terminations Impact Unemployment and Jobs?
Congrats!
“So, congrats, I suppose, to the 77,000 people who get an eight-month vacation,” Leavitt told NewsNation.
Those who accepted the offer are still getting paid so there should be no unemployment claims related to the 77,000 layoffs for 8 months.
Since they are still technically working, if they take another job, the BLS will see this as a new job. However, these persons will likely take a job from someone else who would have gotten one.
DOGE Layoffs
About 77,000 of the above 110,210 will be paid for 8 months. They will not show up in reports for a long time. The others soon will.
The BLS job survey reference week is usually is the 7-day calendar week (Sunday–Saturday) that includes the 12th of the month, with occasional exceptions.
Any layoffs in February on or after the 16th will not be in the payroll report. And the 77,000 who accepted offers will not show up as unemployed for 8 months.
But those ~33,000 layoffs will soon hit claims and the nonfarm payroll reports and claims depending on unemployment eligibility.
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January 31, 2025: The BLS Confirms US is Now Losing Jobs in Net Business Creation
The BLS BED report provides further confirmation the BLS Birth/Death jobs model is seriously screwed up.
February 4, 2025: Job Openings Drop by 556,000 in December, Quits Show Job Finding Stress
Job openings have collapsed. And the number of quits confirms people are staying put.
March 6,2025: ADP Private Employment Up a Weaker than Expected 77,000
The Bloomberg consensus was 162,000 so this was a very weak report.
Small businesses shed 12,000 jobs in the latest ADP report and DOGE will soon have a big impact at the Federal level.
Finally, the surge in immigration has ground to a halt. I expect a halt in the rise of State and Local employment that handles migrations.
Factor in tariffs and you get this: A Global Trade War Has Started – Global Recession Will Follow
I am interested to see whether the federal government honors their responsibility to pay the federal unemployment claims. Those funds are reimbursed to the state govts that manage unemployment on a dollar for dollar basis from the FECA special trust fund, not from the states’ normal trust funds. 500$ a week for 26 weeks for 77000 people is not a small amount of money in this environment.
it wil definitely get worse with this clown in office. Business and industry can’t operate when the US government’s mantra is create as much chaos and unpredictability as possible.
PA gov Josh Shapiro wants to hire 5,600 fired gov workers, if they are qualified. They
will earn gov salary until Sept on top of their salary as PA state’s workers. The quitters may have quit to earn a dual salary for half a year.
PA has about 400,000 state and 100,000 federal workers. Biden’s malivestment to PA and other swing states have stopped. PA budget deficit is growing. PA gov goodies recipients will get less. They will be shocked.
And Trump’s administration knows that some of these workers are going to get picked up by states which is fine. Glad to see this happening.
Historically, the layoffs tend to get into full swing later on in the rate cutting sequence, about half-way down, so perhaps in about 6 months from now, it might be getting a bit busier in that respect. The UK lagging by a few months, and the EU opting for wage suppression instead.
U don’t know what will happen next. SPX and QQQ are backing up above the previous level: July hi/ Aug low, before moving up. QQQ had more penetration to July/Aug box than the DOW and SPX. The rest is bs. The predicted recession might be a desert mirage. It might be another correction to a lower trading box, perhaps deeper. Meanwhile the strong hands are buying shares from the weak hands at wholesale prices.
Keep the hiring freeze from day 1 of Trump’s 2nd term, and don’t fill the 77,000 jobs
Figure that would save about $100K a job per year or $77 billion annually
The Biden Recession is almost in full gear.
The recession will hit before government employees accepting buyouts and have to find another job.
Many co preempted Trump’s tariffs: they imported more and produced more than usual. Inventory of raw materials, semi finished and finished goods is piling up, doing nothing all day, waiting for orders. If buyers hesitate ==> import will plunge and prices will drop. That’s what tariffs are doing. If SPX will plunge later this year and the econ enter a lull JP will cut rates and stay the course, waiting for data.
The defunct Soviet Union ‘paid’ all of their government workers – right up to the collapse.
Independent of anything going on in DC, tech layoffs are going strong – I myself was cut in January and my LinkedIn now has waves and waves of tech workers getting the axe. Some of these are well documented – Meta, Google, LinkedIn – and lots of non-tech (Starbucks) publicly cutting overstaffing levels, which would have happened no matter the election results of just a few months ago.
Some are blaming AI replacing coders and others, but I actually think that is limited just yet, a lot of it is just trimming fat or aligning workforce to forecast. I will say there is nothing new or exciting in tech “hardware” that consumers actually buy (ho hum upgrades to phones, TVs, etc.) and that is probably creating a general drag over the tech sector.
One of my sons is a “lead AI” (whatever that means), and works with coders, and he is a coder himself (and an actual engineer), so it’s not a replacement thing, it’s more of a skills extension. There are still coding jobs that are AI-proof, but some coding is being AI-ified.
I live in CA, and there are daily layoff notices in the local press from tech and biotech companies – today HPE announced 2500. I fear we will see the trifecta of high unemployment, housing price collapse (unemployd people don’t buy houses), and CRE (commercial real estate). CRE is in bad shape and getting worse with layoffs – banks are going to be on the hook for a lot of bad loans from empty offices. Looks like a pretty nasty recession to me.
Thanks for chiming in
If the monies represented by our debts are spent on projects which increase productivity & reduce waste, the debts are beneficial no matter how financed. The initial inflationary effects of bank financing are quickly overcome by the larger output & lower unit costs
That “if condition” is clearly not met by recent government spending patterns.
The initial DOGE investigations are displaying some shocking gov’t spending, like money for Sesame Street in Iraq, hundreds of millions to Internews, hundreds of millions to questionable projects in Afghanistan. Then there is the diversion of $2 billion to Stacey Abrams non-profit. Wait until they get to the DOD, the waste and fraud found will be on an entirely different level.
Between 1985 and 2008 the PPI was rising in a low slog up. In 2020 the PPI made a round trip to 2008 high. Between 2020 low and mid 2022 the PPI took off like rocket. In the last three years the PPI gradually decayed. Under Trump the PPI will resume its uptrend
Unemployment, a fact of life in any modern economy, has an insidious edge to it: the longer you are unemployed, or out of the workforce in general, the more terrible it looks on your resume.
I’ve always been a firm believer in getting creative with your cover letter. Even the resume itself should be a little bit lively and different from the mainstream. When you are competing against a bunch of supplicating aspirants, you want to be independent and strong in your presentation.
But back to unemployment. Trump’s federal dismissals are not going to be a problem if the dismissees have any talent or gumption to them whatsoever. They are after all highly trained knowledge workers. There must be a company SOMEWHERE that will hire them. At the very least, Enterprise car rentals hires college grads, so that’s a place they can start.
I support the DOGE maneuvers by Musk, Trump, et al. to trim the size of the federal workforce, but there’s no way they can reach one trillion in savings doing things that way: it’s like taking an amateur geologist’s rock hammer to Mount Rushmore and expecting to whittle off all the stone faces in a week. Meanwhile, the federal debt continues to balloon, dooming future generations to unspeakable misery…
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You can read more of my writings by visiting: dark . sport . blog — on the net!
It really does depend what you do… it “officeland” maybe, but in other sectors, like offshore seismics, it’s a cyclical industry and people ebb and flow and it’s feast and famine. Companies can’t just train up people, they need people to give the training.
What a joke: 2 million gov workers out of 178 million civilian labor force = 1.1%.
From next months the bloated gov, healthcare workers and teachers – financed by 8T debt – will decrease their size every month, every year, for the next 12 years.
The total gov labor force is about 22/23 millions + contractors.
I mentioned this before and received a lot of negative downvotes. But listen, what I stated will become reality. First, I applaud Musk and Trump for rooting out corruption, fraud, and waste. But, it will come at a cost.
First, unemployment will increase sharply. As noted by Mish, that means spending will decrease for a while. Andrew Jackson was the only president who paid off the national debt. Money went to debt rather than into the system via government spending. That happened in 1835, but that caused an economic crash in 1837. Just imagine if the debt today was settled. It would shock the system since no cash would flow to the economy, only to debt. But that is precisely what Trump is doing. Again bravo! The problem is that several negative feedback loops will result from the shock of the system used to cash from the government, whether by grants, employment, waste, or fraud.
I’m afraid Trump might become Herbert Hoover.
He will be blamed for any recession or worse. There is going to be a period of adjustment. The last four years have been financed by the US government. The economy was not as robust as the number indicated; it was all smoke and mirrors because of massive federal spending.
I believe that what Trump inherited is more of a trap. Stopping spending is easy, but creating a new income generation is more challenging and time-consuming. I just hope we see more investment into the system from the hope of cost-cutting savings.
People get downvoted here for even faintly criticizing Trump. Criticizing Musk is the same thing as criticizing Trump since Musk is the real president (Musk’s own son said so).
You’re right that the economy has been propped up by federal deficit spending ever since the COVID stimulus ended. Musk is hinting that $5000 DOGE checks could soon be given out.
I said before, Musk will be the first trillionaire ever and sooner than most people think, but I didn’t mention bread will cost $20 a loaf by then.
No, people get downvoted for posting ridiculous garbage like you just have.
My advice is to ignore the negativity here and in the media. Nothing you said is wrong. Don’t ever expect him to get credit for anything he does. 97 percent of the media based on donations are Democrats. At least 95 percent academics. Talk to real people. And have the courage to stand by your convictions. Life is not a popularity contest.
Thanks good advice
If the debt were settled today, there would be more debt issued, it’s not like the money would evaporate – money (supply) is debt (credit expansion). What you might want to consider in your thesis is bad debt, where the money is unrepayable, and is written off.
It’s a gig economy now.
I hope so.
Huge crash inbound. Too much uncertainty. We have a president who changes his mind 3x a day about tariffs and who has ceded the hiring and firing of federal employees to Ellen Mush and his gang of hackers. Many of those fired will be rehired after the inevitable lawsuits proceed since Mush had no authority to do what he did. Who would expand their business in such chaotic times?
Many people wrongly believe that immigration is critical to the illicit supply of fentanyl in the United States. However, proponents of this view have offered little more than speculation to support it. New data obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request calls this belief into question. The new dataset shows that US citizens comprised 80 percent of individuals caught with fentanyl during border crossings at ports of entry from 2019 to 2024. https://www.cato.org/blog/us-citizens-were-80-crossers-fentanyl-ports-entry-2019-2024
and how many of those are “new” citizens? dual citizens? or pretend “citizens”?
I don’t know, do you? do you have any clue whatsoever?
Probably it’s US-born people that aren’t going to draw scrutiny. probably some guy or gal that look like accountants.
DOGE DOT and DOD quits might be getting another job. Biden added 1.8 million
federal jobs. 110,000 within two weeks, the first onion peeling machine, is 6% down. That’s a good start. There will be less need for clown workers, healthcare workers and teachers who served immigrants. Demand for skilled steel and highly skilled ship builder workers will be high. We cannot use Chinese and S. Korean imported steel to build our fleet. More steel ==> more coal.
There are only about 2 million federal employees, total, just FYI. Biden would have had to lay off the whole gov’t and rehire them again to accomplish what you claim.
If someone else seems to be saying something dumb, you might question whether you’re getting their message correctly.
“Federal Jobs” doesn’t mean same thing as “Federal Employees”.
Federal Contractors are legion and outnumber actual Federal Employees by huge margins. But those are still Federally funded jobs. Often they’re not included in the stats, though.
FRED.StLouisFed.Gov says there are 3,024,000 Federal Employees, up around 200,000 under Biden’s administration.
I suspect Micheal meant “Government Employees”, which did indeed increase by 1.8 million under Biden, from 21,700,000 to 23,500,000 or so.
The massage is: US steel workers will work day and night to build our new fleet, thanks
We’ve already seen plenty of recipients of taxpayer money… clearly those 100+ year-old recipients of benefits are someone else. Similarly there may be several “jobs” being given to the same corruptocrat who doesn’t do anything.
haha biden added 1.8 million fed jobs? what joke. fact dont mean a damn thing to peole in this forum
I would hardly call people clown workers – not respectful.
And cheering for those job losses is very un- American!
How so?