When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday opened the door to cutting interest rates for the first time in nearly a year, he noted the tremors beginning to shake a main pillar of the U.S. economy: the labor market. 

Concerns about the pace of job growth were heightened earlier this month after government data showed a sharp slowdown in hiring in July, along with much weaker payroll gains in May and June than previously thought. The disappointing numbers were alarming enough for President Trump to question their accuracy and to fire the head of the agency tasked with compiling the data.

Yet labor experts tell CBS News they weren’t surprised by the downturn, and caution that more pain could be in store for job seekers. Data released since the August 1 job numbers shows companies are delaying hiring as they adjust course to account for headwinds including fresh U.S. tariffs and the advent of artificial intelligence, they say. 

“There’s a real cooling in the labor market,” Andy Challenger, senior vice president of executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told CBS MoneyWatch. “We’re also having lots of individual conversations with companies that are letting us know to expect future layoffs.”

He added, “So for me, there is more reason to be pessimistic about the labor market than optimistic we’ll see some major bounce back.”

Here are three charts that could point to a serious downturn in the U.S. job market.

Fewer workers are getting hired

Overall, U.S. employers in 2025 have added fewer jobs on a monthly basis compared with the pace of gains in recent years, when companies sought to expand as the economy roared back from the pandemic. In 2024, employers hired an average of 168,000 workers each month, but that has slowed to an average of 35,000 over the past three months, Powell said on Friday. 

The risk is that the labor market could weaken from here, which could lead to “sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” Powell said. 

The slowdown could spur the Fed to cut its benchmark interest rate, policymakers’ main tool for energizing the economy and job growth, at its meeting next month for the first time since December 2024. Lowering rates could bolster the labor market because it would make it cheaper for consumers to borrow, driving spending, for businesses to invest, including by adding workers. 

More long-term job seekers

Another troubling sign is a recent surge in long-term job seekers, or people who have been searching for a job for more than 27 weeks. In July, about 1.8 million Americans had been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, a jump of about 64% from three years earlier and 20% from a year ago. 

It may not get easier to find work anytime soon, given signs from employers that they intend to continue to cut jobs, Challenger said.

“Don’t take the summer off” from looking for new work, he advised job-hunters. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the labor market will be better in three to six months.”

A jump in unemployed young workers

At the same time, young workers are also having more trouble finding their first jobs, which has been blamed on everything from slowing economic activity this year to employers adopting artificial intelligence in place of entry-level workers. 

To be sure, the nation’s unemployment rate remains low, at 4.2%. Yet that statistic is backward-looking, reflecting the labor market’s strength in previous months — it says little about economic conditions moving forward. 

Meanwhile, for new college graduates the current job market amounts to “a perfect storm,” said career coach Tracey Newell.

“Companies are limiting new entry-level roles, and AI is replacing many traditional ‘starter’ jobs,” she added, noting that it isn’t unusual for employers these days to receive hundreds of job applications for a single position. 

In Might 2027, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch to house. Appropriately named after the “Mom of Hubble,” the telescope will use its 2.4-meter (7.9 ft) huge area of view major mirror and superior devices to research the deeper mysteries of the cosmos. Roman will spend 75% of its observing time over its five-year major mission conducting three core group surveys chosen by the scientific group. Amongst them, Roman will conduct a High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey (HLTDS) to detect tens of 1000’s of sort Ia supernovae.

Astronomers will use these “normal candles” to measure the speed of cosmic growth and check theories concerning Darkish Vitality. This mysterious drive was first theorized by astronomers and cosmologists within the Nineteen Nineties to elucidate the accelerating growth of the Universe. The survey will make the most of Roman’s Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), a 300-megapixel multi-band seen and near-infrared digital camera that can seize an space 200 occasions bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope and with the identical picture sharpness and sensitivity.

Measuring the Cosmos

To measure distances on cosmological scales, scientists depend on what is called the “Cosmic Distance Ladder,,” the place every wrung corresponds to a unique measuring approach. For objects situated inside a number of hundred thousand to some million light-years, astronomers will use variable stars (Cepheid Variables or RR Lyrae Variables) as a “normal candle” to conduct parallax measurements. For objects which are a number of dozen to some hundred million light-years distant, nothing lower than a Kind Ia supernova will suffice for the standard candle.

Kind Ia supernovae are particularly helpful as a result of astronomers understand how inherently vivid they’re at their peak (aka. intrinsic luminosity). By evaluating this to their noticed brightness, scientists can decide how distant they’re. By measuring their redshift, the extent to which it’s elongated because it passes by way of house, scientists can measure the speed of cosmic growth. As well as, Roman’s sensitivity and excessive decision will permit astronomers to look at supernovae that occurred as much as 10 billion years in the past (ca. 3 billion years after the Huge Bang), increasing the noticed timeline of cosmic growth by greater than twice.

Masao Sako, the Arifa Hasan Ahmad and Nada Al Shoaibi Presidential Professor of Physics and Astronomy on the College of Pennsylvania, was co-chair of the committee that outlined the Excessive-Latitude Time-Area Survey. As he indicated in a House Telescope Science Institute (STScI) press release:

Roman is designed to search out tens of 1000’s of sort Ia supernovae out to better distances than ever earlier than. Utilizing them, we are able to measure the growth historical past of the Universe, which is determined by the quantity of darkish matter and darkish power. Finally, we hope to grasp extra concerning the nature of darkish power. We have now a partnership with the ground-based Subaru Observatory, which can do spectroscopic follow-up of the northern sky, whereas Roman will do spectroscopy within the southern sky. With spectroscopy, we are able to confidently inform what sort of supernovae we’re seeing.

Latest observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed an enormous inhabitants of significantly vivid and pink galaxies that existed throughout Cosmic Daybreak (ca. lower than 1 billion years after the Huge Bang). These “little red dots” (LRDs), as they’ve come to be identified, stunned astronomers since they have been brighter and extra plentiful than accepted cosmological fashions would predict. Webb’s early observations additionally revealed that the Universe expanded sooner than these fashions predicted, prompting new theories about “Early Darkish Vitality” (EDE).

Furthermore, latest findings from the Darkish Vitality Survey (DES) counsel that the affect of Darkish Vitality could also be weakening over time. If true, it will have critical implications for our present cosmological fashions, which predict that cosmic growth will proceed till the Universe experiences a situation generally known as “warmth demise,” the place the final of the celebrities die. By detecting sort Ia supernovae as much as 11 billion light-years away, Roman may check these and different theories concerning this mysterious, theoretical drive.

This infographic describes the Excessive-Latitude Time-Area Survey that will probably be performed by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman House Telescope. Credit score: NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart

Discovering Supernovae

The HLTDS will probably be break up into two imaging “tiers” within the northern and southern skies, consisting of a large tier overlaying a bigger space of greater than 18 sq. levels, concentrating on objects throughout the previous 7 billion years of cosmic historical past. There can even be a deep tier that can deal with smaller areas (6.5 sq. levels) for longer time intervals to detect fainter objects that existed as much as 10 billion years in the past. To detect transient objects, the HLTDS will start with a 15-day commentary interval the place Roman will go to many cosmic fields to determine a baseline for comparability.

This will probably be adopted by 180 days of observing the identical fields at common intervals, largely in the course of the center a part of its 5-year major mission. This course of, stated Sako, is named picture subtraction, the place photographs are taken of a area, and something static or unchanging is subtracted from new photographs of the identical area to isolate new issues. The survey can even embrace an prolonged part the place observing fields will probably be revisited each 120 days to seek for objects that change over longer intervals.
This can permit Roman to look at a few of the most energetic and longest-lasting transient occasions and objects that existed as much as one billion years after the Huge Bang.

These latter supernovae range in brightness extra slowly because of the time dilation attributable to cosmic growth. “You actually profit from taking observations over the whole five-year length of the mission,” stated survey co-chair Brad Cenko of NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart. “It permits you to seize these very uncommon, very distant occasions which are actually arduous to get at every other means however that inform us rather a lot concerning the situations within the early Universe.”

The HLTDS is one among three core group surveys, the others being the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey (HLWAS) and the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey (GBTDS). Collectively, these surveys will assist map the Universe with a readability and depth that has by no means been achieved. Roman’s achievements can even complement these of the ESA’s Euclid mission, which is presently observing objects in our Universe from as much as 10 billion years in the past, additionally for the aim of measuring the affect of Darkish Vitality.

Additional Studying: STScI