DOGE hits America's labor market in weekly alternative data

NOTE: The text below was accurate as of Feb. 28, 2025; Revelio data has since been revised, eliminating the Feb. 10-17 plunge previously seen in the chart above.

The surprisingly tight US labor market of recent years has finally met its match: Elon Musk. The mass government layoffs and federal hiring freeze Musk initiated in his capacity as Donald Trump's adviser are being reflected in high-frequency data tracked by CEIC.

We charted Revelio Labs' weekly job posting data against the monthly equivalent from JOLTS – the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. This official report is closely watched for details of underlying labor-market trends, but is published with a significant delay.

Feb. 10 and Feb. 17 figures from Revelio show job postings tumbling, reaching the lowest level in four years. We can also compare Revelio and JOLTS figures for the public sector alone, as we do in one of our charts below; postings have sunk to the lowest since late 2023.

Meanwhile, figures released on Feb. 27 showed that applications for unemployment benefits had risen to the highest level since October, surpassing analysts' forecasts. (The initial jobless claims data generally doesn't include federal workers, according to Bloomberg News, but would include contractors and entities doing business with the government.)

Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had prompted the dismissal of more than 10,000 federal employees as of Feb. 16. More downsizing is planned for the 2.3-million-strong federal workforce, though Musk's efforts could be paused or complicated by lawsuits. Ripple effects are expected to hit the private sector. Besides DOGE, layoffs at high-profile companies ranging from Meta Platforms to Starbucks have also been in focus.

Amid the torrent of news from Trump's Washington and ripple effects on the economy's many moving parts, US employment data is sure to be substantially revised after the initial reports are released. CEIC has recently rolled out its market-leading Point-in-Time datasets, which aim to manage this complexity.

Our PiT data (which includes US non-farm payrolls) includes more than 10 years of revisions, allowing users to accurately assess the information that was available at a specific moment in time. This, in turn, allows for accurate backtesting and risk management -- with models able to mimic how decisions would have been made in real-time market scenarios.

To demonstrate the importance of revised data, we've also visualized the last year's worth of non-farm payrolls (NFP). The most recent figures are for January, when NFP came in at 143,000, trailing the market's expectations for 170,000.

However, revisions for late 2024 are even more notable, showing how resilient the job market had been and explaining why the Federal Reserve paused interest-rate cuts. More jobs were added in November and December last year than initially reported - despite the "plateau" during that time shown by JOLTS.

(The February NFP report is scheduled for release on March 7, and will contain even more revisions of previous months. As we wrote last year, NFP revisions can be controversial - in part due to the effect of hindsight on the Fed's assessment of the economy and interest-rate decisions.)

What might be the wider picture for Musk's perception of federal largesse? Government hiring was the second-largest sectoral contributor to US job growth over the past year, trailing only the education and health category. Granular, regional jobless claims data also reveals that the Washington, D.C. job market also took longer to see an uptick in jobless claims than the nation as a whole; this figure excludes important suburban areas in Maryland and Virginia, however.