The Rachel Maddow Show
How one man took on Trump's improper firings and saved the jobs of thousands of people
Fri, 7 Mar 2025
Rachel Maddow talks with Hampton Dellinger, former chief of the Office of Special Counsel, about the importance of political independence for his watchdog agency, and his fight against Trump to restore the jobs of improperly fired federal workers.
What economic challenges are being discussed related to Trump's policies?
So last night here on the show, we talked about some worrying new hiring numbers, which seemed just like a bad indicator of where the economy appears to be heading very quickly. Now that Donald Trump has taken office again, those numbers from ADP, the payroll company, showed private sector employers hiring less than half the number of people they did last month.
which was half the number economists had been expecting them to hire in February. That was very bad news. Now we've got new numbers, not on the number of hirings, but the number of firings. And those numbers are way worse. Quote, layoffs across the United States soar to highest level since 2020. What was going on in 2020? Employers cut more than 170,000 jobs last month.
That is a 245 percent increase from the number of layoffs in January. 245 percent increase. It's also the highest monthly number of layoffs since the height of the covid pandemic in Trump's first term in July 2020. Now, that said, to be fair, there can be a seasonal component to layoffs and to employment numbers.
Generally, hiring and firing numbers tend to look different in the summer months than they do in the winter months, for example. So if you're really trying to get an honest grasp on how bad this outlook is economically, as Trump's policies are taking hold, consider specifically that these are February numbers that we just got.
If you really want to compare apples to apples, the last time we got February numbers this bad, it was actually February 2009 when Wall Street had collapsed and we were plunging into not just a national but an international Great Recession. That's the last time firing numbers looked like this. That said, these are just indicators, and maybe they are wrong. Maybe these are outliers.
We expect the official government monthly jobs report tomorrow morning. It's actually not expected to be bad, in part because a lot of the firings since Trump has been president have happened so recently that they may not be reflected in government figures yet.
But we shall see, weirdly and worryingly, because the president and his commerce secretary have both started to make noises about messing with the numbers themselves, potentially changing the way the government's official economic statistics are actually compiled. presumably so they won't show bad news that looks bad for Trump.
That is a whole new thing to worry about, whether they're going to try to cook the books on economic numbers like the jobs numbers coming out tomorrow. I don't think anybody expects them to spike the job numbers or pervert them somehow tomorrow. But we will have to wait and see what we get. Last night, we also talked about President Trump's new gift to America's veterans.
The announcement that he's going to fire 80,000 people who work at the VA serving our veterans and providing them health care. Oh, you shouldn't have. Really? 80,000 people fired from the VA specifically? We learned about that last night. Today, NBC News has new reporting on what else Trump is planning to do to veterans.
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