The collapsing U.S. physical economy experienced a sharp ratchet downward last month, expressed by the catastrophic February U.S. employment report, issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor. EIR reported on the change in the pattern of employment from February compared to January of 2026.
However, taking the period from January 2025, when U.S. President Donald Trump took office, through February 2026, a period of 13 months, surfaces disastrous underlying fissures. The principal cause for this shift is the adoption by President Trump and his City of London handlers, of opening wide the spigots of financial speculation flows—crypto and private financing—the unleashing of a calamitous tariff policy, and the disregard of infrastructure and the U.S. agro-industrial base.
We examine three categories of employment from the BLS report.
• Working Employees in the Labor Force: In January 2025, the number of all employees working in the U.S. economy stood at 158.268 million; by February 2026, it rose to 158.466 million, a paltry increase of only 198,000 jobs. The U.S. economy’s workforce usually grows simply due to population growth creating new entrants into the labor force each year. For comparison, for each year between 2016 and 2025 (excluding the year of 2020 when the COVID pandemic distorted employment figures), the size of working employees in the labor force grew by an average of 1.757 million workers per year. In the first year (actually 13 months) since Trump became President, it increased by only 198,000 workers, a cataclysmic fall of 90% less than the yearly average of 2016 through 2025.
