President Donald Trump demanded Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell lower interest rates, on the heels of an unofficial jobs report hitting its lowest level in over two years.
“ADP NUMBER OUT!!! ‘Too Late’ Powell must now LOWER THE RATE. He is unbelievable!!!” the president wrote Wednesday morning. The “ADP number” Trump refers to is the payroll processing firm’s latest jobs report. According to ADP, in May private payrolls increased by just 37,000, the worst showing for any month since March 2023.
The president’s citation of ADP’s report, though, is curious.
Trump’s post is the latest barrage in a long-running campaign to pressure Powell and the Fed to lower interest rates. It comes a week after he met with Powell for the first time since his second inauguration. According to a statement from the Fed after the meeting, Powell defended the central bank’s independence from the president. “Chair Powell did not discuss his expectations for monetary policy,” the statement read, “except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook.”
The president’s citation of ADP’s report, though, is curious. The official May jobs report, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, comes out Friday morning, and the ADP report does not always match the government version. For example, BLS reported that employers added 177,000 jobs in April — nearly three times the 62,000 ADP reported at the time (and later revised down to 60,000). That gap isn’t just a Trump-era phenomenon, either: One year ago, BLS reported nearly twice as many jobs added as ADP. If Trump hadn’t called attention to ADP’s latest report, it quite likely would have attracted little notice.
But perhaps the president’s reaction to the ADP report reflects broader worries about his economic track record. Already, Trump’s chaotic tariff policy has spooked markets; U.S. gross domestic product shrank in the first quarter, the first decline since 2022; consumer confidence has dropped; and consumer spending has slowed.
Job creation, however, has remained fairly stable — a bright spot for Trump so far. A weak official jobs report for May, though, would suggest trouble looming. “It’s too soon to see the full effects of tariffs, DOGE, or other policies on the labor market,” wrote economist Claudia Sahm, creator of the Sahm rule, a recession indicator. “Softening now would suggest less resilience to those later effects, raising the odds of a recession.”
Trump’s complaint will only heighten anticipation of the official May jobs report. In the meantime, the jobs market “remains distressingly gridlocked, with limited hiring and low quits,” Indeed economist Allison Shrivastava told CNBC earlier this week, “and the market can’t keep steadily cooling off forever before it just turns cold.”
