Bulwark Takes - BREAKING: Trump Unveils Insane New Budget; March Jobs Numbers

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Catherine Rampell and Sam Stein are going live to cover economic news, including Trump's new budget proposal and the March jobs numbers.

All right. We are live. It's me, Sam Stein, here with Catherine Rampel for your weekly. What do we call on this? Econ Live show, receipts live. We still have to work on this. We're going to be talking about the economy. Somebody proposed a bull market, which I like, I like. Unless it's a bare market, and then it doesn't really work. Either way, we're going to be talking about a bunch of different things. We have Catherine's latest newsletter, which is phenomenal. We have the jobs report, which actually beat expectations, looked nice. We're going to go under the hood on that.

And then we're going to be talking about this budget, which I am obsessed with. So what happened this morning is that the administration put out a budget. It's a stated priorities for what they want to cut and what they want to fund at a greater level. And there are some really interesting choices. Let's put it that way. But before we get into that, I want to talk about the column because that column does look at the budget too. So the title of the column is Donald Trump trying to lose the election. what makes you question whether he wants to win?

I mean, I don't think he, I'm not literally saying, I think he's trying to lose, but the real question is if he were trying to lose, what exactly would he be doing differently than what he is doing now? And the reason I mention that is that like basically everything that, I don't know, your standard political strategist would suggest a president do if he wants to help his party when the midterms, Donald Trump has done exactly the opposite. Specifically, I mean, we could talk about the war in general, but like specifically, the thing that voters say that they care about, this election, is the same thing that they said that

they cared about in the election that put him back into office, which is prices, affordability. And pretty much everything Donald Trump has done has not only not helped that issue, has made it worse. So there's the war, obviously, which has lots. war plays into that, yes. Yes. So the war plays into that. I mean, the war has lots of other costs that are perhaps much graver than like weather, gas that the pump goes up. But the thing that voters are probably going to show up to the polls and make the decisions on is how much they are paying to fill up their tank, how much they are paying at the grocery store as a result of disruptions in fertilizer,

which are going to drive up food costs. How much more they're going to be paying for pretty much everything across the board? Because as we've discussed, before. This is not just an oil crisis. It is kind of an everything crisis. So much goes through the Strait of Hormuz and so much economic activity here in the United States is conditional on that those supply chains functioning in ways that people may not even appreciate. Like just as a, for instance, do the helium one. Yeah, the helium one. That's where I was going. Yeah. I'm in. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, so people know, obviously, about disruptions to, you know, to fuel. But lots of helium comes through the Middle East, and it's partly because helium, I believe, is a byproduct from the refining of natural gas.

You can also, there are actual, like, helium deposits in the world, but there are very few of them. Sure. So they're also, it's also made through, through processing of natural gas. gas, it's a petrochemical essentially. And helium is now in a crisis. Helium, not just used for your kids' birthday party, also used to manufacture semiconductors. Semiconductors, as people may realize,

are pretty key to this AI boom, which is propping up the US economy right now. So you have a disruption in helium, you also have a disruption in the ability to make these big data center investment, investments, among other things. So lots and lots of, like, unintended consequences, no surprise. And that's going to drive up prices. And then on top of all of that, you have, like, the things that Donald Trump is saying about these concerns and the things that he's asking for in his budget.

Well, okay, first of all, I didn't realize that you were such a helium expert. I'm read in. Did you make your case to sign this? I did not. But I listened to actually a really good podcast called Odd Lots, if people are into Econ. Everyone knows odd lots. Yeah, it's great. It's great. If people are watching this, you might be into Odd Lots. They had a good deep dive in helium.

Secondly, come on. Second. Don't be so dismissive of children's birthday parties, okay? I like those balloons up there. It brings joy to my child. That's as important as a semiconductor. Okay, fair enough. Let's talk about what's time.

High value. Yes, literally and figuratively. Let's talk about what Trump has said because there was a quote, and I'm going to butcher it. You probably know it better than I do. He was talking to Russ Vott, who is the OMB director, basically about cutting all these domestic programs to pay for the war. I wish I had the quote in front of me, but it was so bad. It was like nails on a chalkboard politically to me where he's just like, we can't afford child care. We can't afford daycare.

We're like, we have to pay for the war. Yes. Which was like. Again. Again, the literal opposite of what any Republican strategy, any political strategist, period, would tell you. They're not going to be like, sorry, we can't deal with any of the main expenses affecting your family because we need to send off our boys and girls to get slaughtered abroad.

So we were doing the editing of the newslet last night. I like kind of pulling back the curtain a little bit. And you and I were sort of in the edit comments section where we were talking about, well, is this a directive? Is he really going to do this? Is this more like Trump just riffing? And I think I kind of softened it a little bit. But then it turns out that they put out the budget today. It's like it quite literally is a reflection of that directive. Well, yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. I was just going to say across the board, and we'll get into the specifics in a little bit. Across the board, there are cuts to domestic social state for net programs, not necessarily the major entitlements, which Donald Trump has been steadfast. He's not going to

actually like Social Security and Medicare, although they did cut significantly Medicaid. And there are increases, although I will note, they don't actually specify how much to increase on the DOD side, but there are real increases in what we're putting into our military and we're putting into immigration enforcement. So it is the manifestation of what he said off the cuff to Russ Voss. Well, actually, even before the budget came out today, the administration did try to put that directive into action. Trump told his OMB director to basically stop sending money to blue states for child care, for child care and for other social services, for that matter. You know, ostensibly because he was concerned about fraud. This is, you know, before we actually invaded, we started bombing Iran.

So that happened earlier this year, and there have been a bunch of legal, whatever, orders, court orders, at least, temporarily staying those directives. There was one, I think, actually, that came out yesterday. Because now it's like state by state somewhat because of the way that the Supreme Court has said that these stays can be implemented. But anyway, so Trump has tried to cut child care funding from whatever it was, five blue states. And now, you know, he has not so far succeeded. but then you look at the actual budget that he has put out, as you point out, and that is asking Congress to change the law, which would make it somewhat more resilient to court decisions.

And he's asking for cuts across the board for all sorts of domestic services. And again, explicitly, in some cases, to pay for the war. And it's not just Trump. Like, you know, whenever I cover the budget, whenever journalists cover the budget, we always kind of have to say, you know, this is a symbolic document. It's a statement of, it's a messaging document, it's a statement of priority. It is, though.

It is. But, you know, it's not something that's actually going to happen. But in this particular case, Republicans on the Hill, lawmakers on the Hill, have also said that they're thinking about cutting domestic programs. They're cutting about, they're thinking about making more cuts to health care specifically in order to fund the war. So it's not like Donald Trump just going off on his own and freelancing, which I think some people thought he was. doing. Maybe freelances is not the right word since he's the boss. But, you know, thought that this was like a gaff as something that he said by accident when he said, oh, we can't pay for daycare. We have to pay for the war. Well, we have the video. Let's play the video. And then the other

thing I want to add, as we get the video ready, to your point, because I think it's valid is, you know, budgets are aspirational. Congress does have to legislate them. But especially with this administration, they have exercised executive authorities much further around budgetary items than any other administration. Now, they've been pushed back upon by the courts, and in occasion, Republican lawmakers will say, no, you can't cut this stuff. I need it, especially for my state. But they're very upfront about how they want to go after blue states, specifically along the lines of what the budget proposes, alleging waste and fraud. So, for instance, this morning, let's put up the Vance tweet first, and then we'll play Trump. This is Trump about J.D. Vance.

You'll notice in there, in this tweet, I'm looking for it because it's long. He mentions blue states. There it is. We will call him the fraud czar, and his focus will be everywhere, but primarily in those blue states were crooked Democratic politicians. So they're very, they're not hiding the ball here. Yeah. Now, to the video. Let's just play the video because we've been referencing it of Trump telling Russ Vap more or less to cut stuff.

The Russell don't send any money for daycare because the United States can't take care of daycare. that has to be up to a state. We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare.

It's like, that's just an absolute. Yeah, I mean, it's like just run it as an ad. Well, you didn't play the couple of sentences after that. But after that, he also says, he says something like we can't pay for daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these things. So it does suggest that however much he thought entitlements might have been a third rail, at least Medicare, maybe it's on the table. I mean, it certainly sounds like he left it open to the idea that, you know,

we really can't afford these programs. And look, to be fair, like it is true that our entitlement programs are on an unsustainable spending trajectory and probably we do need some reforms of some kind. But I don't think that's what he had in mind. And it also is, again, not something that politically is maybe advisable to say in a midterm year. Well, we know it's not what he has in mind, not just because of what he said there, which was we have other expenses that are more important, but because of this budget. So I'm going to go through a few things.

You just scream when you want me to stop. Okay. But the sort of top lines here are $1.5 trillion for defense in 2007 fiscal year. Significant money. People don't really process how astronomical that is. It is by far the most in the world. In fact, you look at the top, whatever, five, six other countries combined and wouldn't even come to that.

Roughly, it's a 40% bump from what the United States was spending on the Pentagon on this fiscal year. In addition to that, it would be coupled with $73 billion in cuts across domestic agencies, including the elimination of a lot of programs. So here's what we add, among other things, on ICE and Customs and Border Patrol and Protection

gets another $18.5 billion. ICE gets another $10 billion. Here's the doozy. This one really, I couldn't fathom it. in the fine print he asks for $1.7 billion with a B dollars for the restoration of Alcatraz

Now if people don't know what Alcatraz is, it is the defunct federal prison in San Francisco Bay that is now a tourist facility. I don't know if you've been there, Catherine. I went when I was a kid. Pretty cool. You might know it from The Rock. I don't know if we have any clips of that

incredible movie with Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery. to spend $1.7 billion to restore it to some sort of functioning prison is shocking to me. I can't believe they put their name to this. Especially since we don't have money for health care. We're going to get to me. Yeah. It's just, again, in isolation, this is lunacy, but it's especially galling when you think about what the opportunity costs are, right?

Like what is what we don't have money for, but we do have money for this. We have money for a war that Congress has not authorized. We have money to restore what is now a museum into some sort of inhumane prison. I kind of remember. I'm trying to remember what exactly happened last year. Didn't Donald Trump want to revive Alcatraz last year? Like after watching it on Air Force, after watching Air Force, what's it called, escape from Alcatraz on Air Force One?

Am I making this up? This is what I remember. Is that what true? him? I think so. Well, well, what I remember, and somebody in the comments can correct me, or Google this or whatever, is that Trump, like, had these tweets, truth social posts about wanting to bring it back. And then it turned out that it, like, Escape from Alcatraz happened to have been playing the night before on PBS. And so, I mean, I guess we don't know definitively, but we know. Correlation or causation. Who knows? And then we know the president likes his

telly. So I think that was what happened here. You know, he wants things that are telegenic and this prison. I think it's no more complicated in that. Yes. I think it's no more complicated than that. The other thing that was kind of tucked in there, which didn't get much attention, but part of the Department of Transportation budget, I'm being told in our Slack that you are right. Okay. Okay. Staked your own address. All right. Tucked into this budget is a request for Department of Transportation money. They want $403 million for a safe and beautiful transportation in Washington, D.C. Look, I'm a resident.

Thank you. We'd take it, but probably not the best use of money. And in that little paragraph, they note this. This program, one of the programs are funding, would also support DOT's recent actions to refocused management and provide a long-term vision to modernize Washington Union Station. It is yet another transportation or infrastructure project in the D.C. area that this man is trying to take over and run. Union Station, Dulles Airport, the ballroom, the reflecting pool. Am I missing something?

There's going to be like some kind of arch that he wants to build. Oh, yeah, the art. Yeah, overlooking Arlington National Cemetery. Arniquet Stadium. He wants to do FK Stadium too. He is absolutely going to remake Washington, D.C. it's not the best use of taxpayer funds, I would just argue, even as a resident. But what is, okay, brings us to the most important part, which is, what are the big cut? I will say, meanwhile, he's trying to withhold funding from infrastructure projects here in New York, where I live.

Yeah, the gateway tunnel. Gateway tunnel. And he had talked about, what was the news story a few weeks ago? God, my brain is mush, about he wants Penn Station named after him or somebody wanted to name here? No, that was the deal. going to have, Chumor was going to get Penn Station named after him, and in exchange, Trump would release the gateway tunnel funding. You know what?

Pen station sucks. They deserve each other. I don't mind the Moynihan Hall. I think Moynihan Hall is pretty good. Moynihan Hall is very pretty, but there's no seating and it kind of sucks. I think that's deliberate. Okay. Yeah, I think it's, yes.

Okay, cuts. Now, here's where, this is where you actually have to put your name to stuff that's painful. And from what I can tell, they don't care. And this gets to your theory. Are they trying to like blow this thing? So among the cuts that we have here in the budget document, $5 billion cuts to the National Institutes of Health,

I want to just stop there for a second because you write about this stuff, I write about this stuff, this stuff matters, okay? We were for decades the leader globally of scientific and medical research. We did that because we spent a lot of money on this stuff. And by doing that, we didn't just have incredible breakthroughs that then benefited us economically,

medically, medically and scientifically. We became a magnet for the top talent across the globe to come here because they knew they could get funding for projects that they wanted to do. It was a great system that essentially paid for itself. And up until this Trump administration, every president has been pretty damn dedicated to funding it and keeping that system alive with one tiny exception, which was during the Obama administration. They put this NIH in sequestration, but it was reversed. And yet now, the Trump administration, this is the second or third time

they have gone with the absolute acts at NIH funding. Obviously, the first was when they came in and Elon Musk was doing this. And I'm just, it's flabbergasting to me. I don't get it. I really don't get it. Yeah.

Last year, I wrote a piece called How to Lose the 21st Century and three easy steps. And one of the steps was slaughter your golden goose, which is, science, research technology. And that is exactly what we are doing.

I mean, we've done it through lots of different means, not just gutting these scientific agencies, also taking away grants from other research institutions that are not affiliated with the federal government, that get NSF funds, NIH grants, et cetera. And of course, cutting off that talent pipeline. So you mentioned the fact that our, you know, are our premieres,

premier scientific research, health research system attracted a lot of talent. Now to the extent that talent wants to come here, still, they're often unable to because we have made it so much more difficult for students to come here, as well as for people, you know, out of school, scientific experts to come here. And really, this has been our golden goose for over a century. It's not just about like do-gooderism. It's great idea to cure cancer and to, you know, to work on rare medical diseases and to improve people's lives and all of those things that seem fairly obvious. It's also been a big economic generator here in the United States. Yeah, 100%. Because when the federal government funds particularly basic research, that has

these spillover effects to the private sector where you have like a thriving biotech industry, that, you know, can make money coming up with these scientific breakthroughs. So it's like we are shooting ourselves in the foot so many times over. And for what? For what? That's the thing. It's like what is the actual, okay, so let's say you cut $5 billion in NIH funding. I mean, it's not nothing, $5 billion. But you're spending $1.7 billion on Alcatraz, okay, and $300 million or so on Union Station.

And God knows how much more on that. some defense department initiative. And over a billion dollars a day on the war right now, right? And if you're just thinking short-term, maybe you can say, oh, well, we need that. It's a short-term expense in Iran. But, boy, like, the long-term ramifications of this are hard to have fathom. And people always tell me, well, you know, if the research is so important, if the science is so critical, then the private sector will do it.

And that's just not how it works. Well, it might have, no. At least when it comes to some research, private sector research and development dollars is going to go to stuff that they think will turn profits. Yes. It's not going to go to stuff that you have a 10 to 15, 20 year ramp up with uncertainty that it will ever get to market. That's what the NIH is for. Well, yeah. And the idea of basic research is that these are discoveries,

or scientific endeavors that can have applications to a whole bunch of industries, to a whole bunch, can shoot off into different kinds of innovation. And there's not a lot of incentive for the private sector to do that if they can't capture all of the gains themselves. The whole idea of basic research is that this is the kind of research that underpins lots of other discoveries and then other people can go off and run with it,

and figure out how to apply it in their field. Like something like, you know, MRI vaccines, for example. Which we are just killing right now. Well, yes. That's the regulatory initiatives too. But yeah, it's crazy. Yes, yes. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing where you have, like,

one fundamental scientific breakthrough that then can change the course of so many other scientific trajectories. And, you know, when you have, when you have a private, business that cannot capture the full value of the potential upside, right? Because it's risky. You know, part of the thing, like part of the reason why you want some public subsidization of research is that not everything pays off. And so you want to have a system where, like, you can have scientists take risks where

even if it doesn't pay off, like literally pay off, you know, doesn't, you don't get your money back, you still are incentivizing. You're still enabling. 100%. All right, I got to get to some of these other cuts here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to go through a few of them. 2.7 billion proposed cut to higher ed. We have $4 billion proposed cut to LIHEAP. For folks who don't know what LIHEAP is, it's heating assistance for poor people. There is a elimination of the Food for Peace, program, which, you know, helps people in impoverished communities eat. That's $1.2 billion saved by limiting that program. It's, again, $500 million to go until you get to the cost

for building Alcatraz. This one's going to make Jonathan Cohn cry. It will terminate, the budget would terminate the what they call unnecessary subsidies for electric vehicle chargers, which is $4.2 billion saved, basically handing over the EV industry to China once more. You need those chargers in order to get people to buy EVs because they are fearful that they will

get stuck on some long winding journey without a charging station, although that's less and less of an issue now, as Kona has written about. I just want to pull up, just to give you a sense of how it's not silly, but I don't know what you want to call it, how contradictory some of this stuff is. I noticed this in the McGovern-Dole

food for education purpose. Now, people don't really may not know what this is, and I'm not like an expert on this, but this is, again, it's one of those things that helps people eat. And on the website currently of the federal government is this, the statutory objectives. This is the current website of the Trump administration. The statutory objectives of the McGovern Dole program are to reduce hunger and improve literacy in primary education, especially for girls, by providing school meals and teacher training, yada, yada, yada.

So according to the Trump administration, looks like a pretty damn important. initiative that is important and significant for women and girls specifically. This is what they say in the budget. Can we put that up as well? It's wasteful and inefficient. Food often takes months to arrive. They want the whole thing eliminated, say $240 million. So anyways, I just felt that was an interesting dichotomy there. But to your point, Catherine, in your article, this budget is a list of priorities and the priorities that they're announcing to the public don't seem all that politically advantageous or tenable, honestly, for them. in the case of the Dolma

Goverin program that you mentioned, I'm honestly surprised that that has survived the cuts from last year when we gutted all sorts of other foreign aid, including foreign food aid. So I'm glad it's still around. I didn't even know it was. Yeah, some of these things I was like,

wow, they didn't, Elon didn't get to that one? I know. But yeah, it's surprising to me because, like besides the fact that, again, And you can make the case for a lot of these kinds of programs on the merits, you know, just in terms of like policy. It's good to have research that has economic benefits. It's good to save people's lives. It's good to help people be able to pay for heat in the winter.

Again, it's also very popular to do those things. And sometimes what's politically good and what's, you know, policy effective, those do align. They don't always align, but here they do. And that's why it's particularly bizarre that even in this statement of their priorities, which may be symbolic and may not even get through, they don't even like gesture at the idea of keeping these kinds of popular programs around. And if you look at recent polling, Gallup had polling recently looking at, they do this like every month, you know, what is the most important issue to voters and the most important domestic issue to voters, at least as I think. early March was health care. That's the thing that they were most worried about. Healthcare, both in terms of affordability and availability, that may change now that gas prices have gone up quite a bit. Maybe they'll be more concerned about that. But that doesn't mean

that they'll be less concerned in absolute terms about the cost of health care. And meanwhile, this administration in cahoots with their co-partisans on Capitol Hill is gutting health just as they did last year when they cut Medicaid and they decline to extend those enhanced premium tax credits for people who are getting health care on the exchanges, they're trying to cut it further through a bunch of measures in this budget and other things that have been proposed by lawmakers. And it's just so strange to me that they're ignoring. Yeah.

And it's inexplicable because, look, say what you will about Donald Trump. We say a lot about Donald Trump. I always thought of him as someone who, at the bare minimum, when it came down to it, would just do whatever he thought was politically the right thing to do. I don't think he cares anything more than about his own survival and political viability. And surely he knows that this type of stuff is toxic. I mean, he lived through it when he tried to repeal and replace Obama and care in his first term. We have a couple things to get to. One series and then the other, just an incredibly bizarre question.

quirky story involving Mount Everest. Oh, right. Yeah, I forgot about that story. That's the dessert. But first, the jobs numbers. Look, I'm going to call spade a spade. They came in better than expected, right? I mean, it was, especially after last month, especially with the surrounding circumstances

in all the noise and the geopolitics, they came in fairly good. So now we're pointing to the negative chart right now, but you will see March. added 178,000 jobs. And you can see the month before was negative 133,000. So look, I'm not, obviously, if you scan back, this is not a great labor market relative to where we were, not even that many years ago coming out of COVID. But it could have gone, in my estimation, it could have been a lot worse this month. In fact, the economics estimates were that

will come in worse. Yeah. Well, a couple of things to point out. One is that, that while the numbers for March were better than expected, the numbers for February were actually worse than originally reported. And those things are kind of related. Part of what drove the decline in February and then the reversal in March is a strike that happened. There was a healthcare strike that happened in February

that stripped a lot of people off of payrolls temporarily when they got added back to payrolls in March. reversed itself. So like it's two sides of the same coin. But in general, healthcare has been driving the job market like over the past year. I think it was the Wall Street Journal that pointed out this fact that I had not noticed that if you strip out- All jobs are healthcare basically? On that, yeah, basically on that, that if you strip out what's happened in healthcare and social services, which is like a whole, so that's the category for the industry. If you strip that out, the economy actually lost half a million jobs over the

past year, which is pretty striking. So I guess how is it possible, not on the health care side, I mean, why are there just an aging population? We need more people to care for them. What is it going on here? Yeah, I think it's largely that. It's demographics. And so there's just a lot more demand for home health care aids, for people who are treating, testing for, lots of. Lots of of kinds of medical ailments that become more prevalent as people age. So it's that. It's largely demographics. And, you know, until recently, the government subsidizes all.

The government is a backstop for all of that. So it's not completely controlled by market forces, right? It's like the way we were talking about how Medicare is on and probably an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. Well, every Medicare dollar that is spent is somebody else's medical income, right? So that sustains jobs. Now, that brings me to the second piece of this analysis, which is how sustainable is all of that, not only because, you know, like it's expensive, but also Congress, again, just passed a major cut to Medicaid funding.

It hasn't gone into effect yet. it will go into effect, I guess, at the end of this year, beginning of next year. And those Medicaid dollars sustain a lot of health care spending, especially in rural areas. You know, the passage of Obamacare was a godsend to a lot of rural hospitals because it meant that people were suddenly able to, you know, because of Medicaid expansions, they were suddenly able to afford care. And so that sustained a lot of hospitals that were like teetering on the brink and couldn't afford to pay their staff or whatever. Now they had those federal dollars flowing in. So you're going to see some reversal of all of that. That's part one for why that industry may not continue to have the same rapid job gains that we've seen in the past few years.

And then the other, it has to do with the labor force, which is that the Trump administration is deporting and deduble. documenting, for lack of a better word, a lot of healthcare workers are attempting to right now. So just as an example, there are a lot of Haitian immigrants who work in health care in positions like home health aides. For example, patients are widely overrepresented in those occupations. And a lot of Haitian immigrants who are here are here legally. They're on a program called Temporary Protect. Yes, exactly. Temporary protected status, which says that, they are allowed to stay here and they're allowed to work, they have a work permit, Donald Trump is trying to strip them of that work authorization and that temporary legal status.

And, you know, there have been a bunch of efforts like this. They have been held up by the courts. But in the meantime, there's at least a lot of uncertainty. And if you're an employer and you're thinking about hiring someone, like... You can't hire someone whose TPS is going to get, you know, reverse. revoked a week, right? Like, that's impossible. Let me just say on the TPS thing, just a quick thing, because, again, we're referencing a lot of Jonathan Cohen here. But he had a great piece on the Haitian caregiving community and what they're going through. And actually, in about, I don't know, 30 minutes or so, Adrian Kyrskillo, who does our immigration newsletter, Huddled Masses. He's writing about what's happening in Miami. And one of the things that he got in his reporting is the same exact uncertainties. Like, there's a Haitian community out there. And here's the sort of pervasive. development of this, that they registered with the government to get TPS. So all the immigration authorities know exactly who they are and where they are. And they're just basically sitting

ducks. So once the TPS comes, they are, you know, they are just expected to be gone. And this is causing incredible uncertainty here. Let me ask you just quickly, last question on the jobs report, which is on the, on the worker side of the ledger, which is, are their jobs available or are other people going out and looking for work at this point in time. Heather Long, who's now the chief economist at Navy Federal, she was at the Washington Post. Yeah, she was my colleague. She's awesome. She's awesome.

She's awesome. She is welcome on this show whenever she wants. Heather, if you're listening. Yep, I'll let her know. I'm sure you're in the comment section. All right. So she knows that the employment route fell to 4.3% for this last month. But not what she says for great reasons.

There's a big drop almost 400. thousand in the labor force. Labor force partition rate also fell. It appears people stopped looking for work in March or perhaps more migrants left the workforce for both. I think it's both, but that's just my intuition. But what do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's probably a combination of those things. Look, to be fair, like these, those survey numbers are really noisy. They've gotten noisier over time because it's been increasingly difficult to get people to answer surveys. So I just want to like present all this with a grain of salt. But on its face, it does not look great. And my guess is that part of what's happening here is, or a large part of what's happening

here is about immigrant workers who are either losing status, they're afraid they're going to lose status. And by status, I mean their legal ability to work to be here and to work here. So their work authorization. And so some combination of people already getting forced out of the workforce or at least a lot of uncertainty about whether they can work. I don't know how they're, if that they may, that may also be corrupting the data in some sense. Like if people are afraid of answering truthfully in these surveys. And I, there's probably some effort to figure out how big of an error that's introducing, but I just don't know it offhand. So, so yeah, I think a lot of this is probably about the immigrant workforce, which was driving the economy, was driving the job

market for a few years there. And it's part of the reason why we had such strong gains. The Trump administration has argued, oh, well, those, it's zero sum. And any jobs that were going to immigrants were at the expense of native-born heritage Americans, which is not actually true. I mean, these are a lot of jobs that kind of like would have gone begging otherwise, particularly because they're in fields Native-born Americans don't want to work in, but also because like the demographic issues we were talking about, Native-born Americans are getting older. They're aging out of the workforce.

Immigrants are much more likely to be working age. So all of those things combine is part of how we had such strong growth before. And now conversely, you're seeing that there are fewer people in the labor market. And that's, again, I think likely at least partly due to fewer immigrants coming into the country. We have like net out migration right now. And then those who are here, there's a lot more uncertainty about whether they can work or whether they can work on the books, whether they're willing to tell these surveyors, you know, the people fielding surveys that they're working, et cetera. So, you know, the Trump administration is like suggesting this is a good news story.

I guess. They have two prongs of how they spin this. Yeah. The first is we have net negative migration, therefore there are more jobs for native-born workers, and that's great, right? The second is the job losses are predominantly coming from the public sector, which means we are just taking away people on the tax paradigm were decreasing our tax footprint, and that also is great. And frankly, it, I think just me, more people employed in spending money is better. That's just me.

All right. But it's not even true that it's not even true that it's, you know, it's not only the public sector. It's also the private sector that's been losing a lot of jobs. Yeah. Okay. So last, sorry. This was so amazing and bizarre. And I, I mean, it seems almost untrue, but it is, it's in the telegraph.

I'm going to assume it's true. apparently there's a great fraud, insurance fraud scandal happening with foreign climbers going to Everest being poisoned by their guides, their Sherpas, so that they have to spend money on fake rescue scams involving helicopters.

What the fuck? I know. Oh my God, this story was wild. It was really crazy. Yeah, and the story said, I guess this has been going on for a few years and to some extent it's been reported on on an offer a few years and insurance companies are like getting wise to it and they're like well we're

not going to ensure people's missions these very dangerous missions up mount Everest if we think like they're going to get sick on purpose uh and the story said that sometimes the climbers were in cahoots with uh they're acting right they well no they they like knowingly ingested baking soda or whatever yeah I think that was my understanding that they like you know to fake the symptoms of altitude sickness, but a lot of the times they were being duped. You know, they paid however much money it is, I'm sure it's extremely expensive

to hire these guides to do this dangerous trip. And then, wait, I don't have the article in front of me, but it was crazy. Some of the ways they got them sick were kind of... They were all... I mean, it was, like, there's no good way, I guess. Like rat droppings? No, no, it wasn't that.

It was like a lot of baking powder or something like that. No, no, no, it was both. It was both. Let me pull it up. dropings? Yes. It was baking soda. Okay, yeah, sorry. This is in the independent, not the telegraph. Oh, sorry. That's okay. But I have in front of me now. Okay. So, where is it? This is real research in real time. Yeah, real time. Yes, okay. Some unknowing trackers were allegedly made temporarily unwell due to their meals being spiked with baking soda, uncooked chicken,

or even rat droppings. That's, that. That's in black and white. Oh, man. And so, yeah, and God, it sounds, I mean, whatever. And then they have to get evacuated out, you know, for billions of dollars. That's the whole scam. And sometimes they would charge them for different flights, even though they were on the same flight. It was just a real scam.

An incredible scam involving, like, negligent government oversight agencies, Shurpas, rich people going to Everest and maybe being taken for a bag. I was about to actually, you might not know this about this. I'm climbing Everest next month. I've been training for months, and I'm now cancel me. I'm not going to do it. Oh, okay. Well, that sounds like a wise financial decision.

Yeah. I don't want to do it anymore. I don't want to get ripped off or rat poisoned or something like that. All right, Catherine, thank you so much. I really covered the waterfront on this one. Went from budgetary policy to rat poison and all that in between. So thank you for everything. Rat droppings, not rat poised.

I don't know if that's better or worse. That dropping poisoning. Yes. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Hey, for everyone watching, I've been watching in the comments section. Someone told me to get a mic stand or something because they could hear me typing. You know what?

We're trying to multitask here. I'm sorry if my typing got a little loud. We'll do better next time. In exchange for us doing that, subscribe to the feed. Talk to you guys soon. Have a great weekend. Take care. Bye, bye.