Hey, hope you’ve had a great week.

Anyone with a Truth Social account and a calculator could have told you last night that this morning’s December jobs report would miss expectations (more on that below). But they couldn’t have told you about a trend that ramped up as 2025 came to a close, which we’ll dig into in today’s newsletter.

The December jobs report, out Friday morning, reflected a sluggish job market. The unemployment rate fell a tad, to 4.4%. But the economy added fewer jobs than it did in November, and that seems to be weighing on the long-term unemployment rate.

Of the people who were unemployed and looking for work, 26% have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. It’s the highest that number has been since the pandemic.

The job market is maybe the economic indicator to watch right now. Though it’s not looking bad, it’s also not looking good.

“The labor market feels very fragile,” said Michael Linden, senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

He said a lot of the fragility is in the long-term unemployment rate. Before and after the pandemic, the number of unemployed people out of work for 27-plus weeks hovered around 20%. Which makes this spike unusual.

“We don’t often see increases in long-term unemployment outside of recessions,” Linden said. 

It means something funny is happening in the labor market right now.

“Employers are not doing a lot of hiring right now. Workers are not quitting. There’s not a lot of churn in the labor market so it’s harder for workers to break in,” said Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. 

In other words, low-hire, low-fire.

Another idea? The economy is in the middle of a job market reorganization, said Philipp Kircher, professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell. Like, some human workers are being replaced with artificial intelligence.

“These people have to look not necessarily for a new job, but also for a new sector and that might take time,” Kircher said. 

Even if the unemployment rate stays relatively low, he said, long-term unemployment still has negative effects on the economy — and negative effects on those job seekers the longer they’re looking.

Child care is a textbook example of a broken market, Kashen said. Providing high-quality child care is hard, expensive work, one state and local governments around the country have been trying to figure out how to subsidize.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Thursday they would use state funds to expand an existing free preschool program to even younger children, starting with “high-need” areas of the city.

President Trump posted a chart on social media last night showing 2025 job growth, a chart not unlike the ones the White House Council of Economic Advisers uses to brief the president on confidential jobs numbers the night before their release. With a little math and existing data , anyone could piece together this morning’s big number.

These figures are tightly controlled because they have the power to move markets by the trillions. Not even the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (who you may remember Trump fired over an unflattering jobs report last year) sees the headline data more than a couple days early. Public officials aren’t supposed to weigh in on the release at all until it’s been out 30 minutes.

As our own Kai Ryssdal points out, giving the public a preview is just one norm Trump broke in the first term, and one he’s breaking more flagrantly now. The White House said it was an accident; Trump said, “when people give me things I post them.”