Tariff talk has overshadowed economic achievements of the second Trump administration through its first 100 days, according to a White House memo.
Special: Trump's HISTORIC First 100 Days Offers Huge Opportunity... See Here
Nearly 350,000 jobs have been created and prices have declined in several key sectors since President Donald Trump was sworn into office Jan. 20, according to an economic memo released by the president's Council on Economic Advisers Staff.
Economic achievements since Trump took office include:
- 345,000 jobs created, including 188,000 (54%) neither government nor government-adjacent.
- 2,000 mining and logging jobs created.
- 27,000 construction jobs created.
- 9,000 manufacturing jobs created (compared to the 6,000 manufacturing jobs lost per month from Jan 2023 to Dec 2024).
- 15,000 federal government jobs cut.
- Labor force participation rate for those without a high school diploma up by 0.7%.
- Veteran unemployment rate down from 4.2% in January to 3.8% in March.
- 228,000 jobs created in March alone, well above expectations; the fourth best month in the last two years for private payroll growth.
- Remote work among federal employees has fallen over 16 percentage points from March last year to March this year.
- Prescription drug prices down more than 2%; last month's drop in the price of prescription drugs was the largest ever recorded.
- Gasoline prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), down 7%.
- Energy prices down 2%.
- Wholesale egg prices down about 50%.
- February inflation (the month prior to the most recent data) showed the smallest annual increase in core inflation in over four years (since March 2021).
- Last two CPI inflation prints came in below expectations.
- Last month's (March) decline was only the second monthly decline in inflation (CPI) in the last two-and-a-half years.
- Price declines are in contrast to the persistently high inflation under President Joe Biden, which reached the highest annual rate in the past 40 years. After suffering for years under Biden administration inflation, consumers are now getting welcome relief. On Biden's watch, grocery prices rose 23%, and energy prices rose 34%. As a result of biting inflation, real wages in Biden's term were down about 2.4%.
- In the most recent inflation print from March, airfare, used motor vehicles, and motor insurance all saw price decreases.
- Prices for wholesale goods fell nearly 1% last month and prices for wholesale services fell 0.2% last month, which will eventually lead to lower consumer prices.
- Last month, retail egg price inflation continued to slow.
- Real average hourly earnings for middle- and low-income workers are up 0.4% and up 1% for workers in the manufacturing sector.
- The automotive sector is growing: under Trump, we already had the biggest one-month increase in auto sales in March in more than a year.
- Mortgage rates have declined roughly four-tenths of a percentage point. Assuming the most recent median home price in the U.S., a new homebuyer making a 20% down payment on a 30-year mortgage would save roughly $32,400 over the course of the loan, or about $1,080 per year.
- Industrial production was at the seventh-highest monthly level ever recorded in March. The only higher monthly levels occurred during the first Trump administration in 2018 and in February of this year.
- Since the beginning of the Trump administration, at least $5 trillion in new investment in the U.S. has been pledged from both foreign governments and private companies.
- Upon taking office, Trump immediately blocked all unfinalized Biden-era rules, saving Americans over $180 billion — $2,100 per family of four over the next decade — and launched a bold, multi-agency effort to roll back existing federal regulations that drive up the cost of living. This effort is projected to yield significant cost savings in the coming months, including the EPA's rollback of tailpipe emission rules for light-duty and medium-duty vehicles ($667 billion in total savings) and the Department of Transportation's latest Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards ($88 billion in savings). These two efforts alone yield $755 billion in total savings or over $8,800 per family of four over the next decade. The combined savings from all of these actions equal just over $935 billion or nearly $11,000 per family of four over the coming decade.
- The Trump administration has implemented an aggressive 10-to-1 deregulatory initiative, which requires that whenever an agency proposes a new rule or guidance document, it must eliminate 10 existing rules or guidance documents. This effort builds on the successful deregulatory initiative introduced in President Trump's first term, which required the repeal of at least two existing regulations for each new rule, and in practice eliminated 5.5 rules for each new significant rule.
- To date, Trump has issued over 20 significant deregulatory presidential actions (i.e., executive orders, presidential memoranda, and presidential proclamations).