The U.S. economy added 147,000 jobs in June, beating expectations, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A notable contributor to the growth was government hiring — though not at the federal level.
The federal government lost jobs for the fifth consecutive month. Since January, federal payrolls have shrunk by 69,000 jobs, seasonally adjusted.
In contrast, state and local governments appeared to go on a hiring spree. But appearances can be misleading.
Some state officials are actively trying to attract laid-off federal workers. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul launched a campaign aimed at hiring former federal employees.
“The federal government might say you’re fired, but here in New York we say you’re hired,” Hochul said.
Roughly 10,000 people have applied through the program so far, but only 112 have actually been hired.
Brian Levine, co-founder of FormerGov.com — a website that connects former government employees with employers — said competition for that talent has been intense.
“Both state governments, local governments and private sector employers are tripping over each other to try and get some of this talent if they can,” Levine said.
Still, in an economy with a labor force of about 170 million people, former federal workers aren’t significantly moving the needle. Something else appears to be driving the growth.
Seasonally adjusted figures show a gain of 40,000 jobs in state and local education. But Eric Winograd, chief economist at AllianceBernstein, said that figure doesn’t reflect actual hiring.
“In truth, we didn’t,” Winograd said. “There wasn’t actually an increase in hiring.”
Job numbers are seasonally adjusted to account for predictable fluctuations — such as school breaks or holiday shopping — that would otherwise cause large monthly swings. In this case, there were fewer education job losses than usual for June, which showed up in the data as a gain.
“June can be a tricky month,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics.
She said surveys can vary, school calendars shift, and sample sizes fluctuate — making seasonal adjustments particularly difficult to interpret in the summer.
“We think that the strength in job growth at the state and local level was overstated by these seasonal quirks,” she said.
Economists caution against reading too much into any single month’s numbers. The broader trend, they say, still points to a labor market that remains relatively steady, even if it’s not surging.