The Labor Department announced on Wednesday that applications for unemployment claims in the United States decreased by 10,000 to 214,000 for the week ending December 20 from 224,000 the week before.

Last month, the jobless rate increased to 4.6%, the highest level since 2021. Due to pressure from billionaire Elon Musk's purge of U.S. government payrolls, many federal employees resigned at the end of fiscal year 2025 on September 30, resulting in the 162,000 job losses in October.

Hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in an outburst of pandemic-induced inflation.

According to Fed Chair Jerome Powell, the committee lowered borrowing costs because they were worried that the labor market was much worse than it seemed.

According to Powell, recent employment statistics may be revised downward by as much as 60,000, meaning that since the spring, firms have been eliminating roughly 25,000 jobs on average each month.

According to the statistics, 1.92 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits during the week ending December 13, an increase of 38,000.