The Trump administration celebrated its first monthly jobs report Friday, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcing the addition of more than 151,00 new jobs in February.
“In one month under President Trump, the American economy is soaring back to greatness after the economic calamity left by Joe Biden,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement.
“The manufacturing industry is already rebounding, as there were 9,000 new auto jobs created—the most auto jobs added in 15 months! Under President Trump, the private sector is leading the way—93% of the job gains in February were in the private sector. This is great news for American workers and families.”
POTUS: “During the last year, the Biden administration saw a loss of more than 110K manufacturing jobs or 9K manufacturing jobs every single month — During the first full month in office, we’ve not only stopped the manufacturing collapse, but we’ve begun to rapidly reverse it… pic.twitter.com/njThXqesr1
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 7, 2025
The jobs report, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that “[t]oval nonfarm payroll employment rose by 151,000 in February.”
“Nonfarm payroll employment” refers to all jobs, except for those in agriculture, self-employed workers, those in the nonprofit sector, and members of the military.
The jobs report is mostly positive, as it indicates “employment trended up in health care, financial activities, transportation and warehousing, and social assistance.”
However, the total number of unemployed Americans remained mostly unchanged.
“Both the unemployment rate, at 4.1 percent, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.1 million, changed little in February,” the report stated.
“The unemployment rate has remained in a narrow range of 4.0 percent to 4.2 percent since May 2024.”
Trump celebrated the report in the Oval Office, especially the fact that Americans’ job gains were higher than those of foreign workers.
“For the first time in [15] months, the job gains native-born Americans, for American people, people born in America exceeded job gains for migrant and foreign-born workers. Employment for native-born workers went up by [284,000], while foreign-born workers went down by [87,000].”
PRESIDENT TRUMP: For the first time in fifteen months, the job gains for native-born Americans exceeded the job gains for migrant and foreign workers. Employment for native-born workers went up by 284K while foreign born workers went down by 87K. pic.twitter.com/rDoEQww4Yp
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 7, 2025
Notably, the report indicates that “federal government employment declined by 10,000 in February.”
That comes after a month of aggressive cuts by the Trump administration to federal agencies, such as at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as amid anti-bureaucray rhetoric from the administration.
The president cheered on this shift of employment gains to the private sector.
“Under the final two years of [President Joe] Biden, one in every four jobs created in America was a government job. That’s a tremendous percentage. But under the first full month of President Trump—which we haven’t even gotten started yet—an incredible 93% of all job gains were in the private sector.”
.@POTUS: “Under the final two years of Biden, one in every four jobs created in America was a government job… But under the first full month of President Trump, an incredible 93% of all job gains were in the private sector.” ? pic.twitter.com/3Ai1Rskvps
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 7, 2025
The president’s remarks echo those of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who spoke at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday of a shift from a public sector economy to a private sector one.
“When you think about 25% of GDP flowing through [Washington, D.C.] area code 202, everybody’s trying to skim a portion of it, trying to reallocate it,” he said.
“This has been a government-driven economy. You want to make this a private sector-driven economy. We want to, as I understand it, disempower the public federal bureaucracy and re-empower the kind of risk-taking and investment that goes along with private sector advances.”
In its statement to the press, the Trump administration also touted an increase in automobile industry jobs in February. Trump was reelected on a promise of bringing auto manufacturing back to the United States.
“The rebound in manufacturing jobs was led by the automobile sector, which gained 8,900 new jobs in February—after losing 27,300 auto jobs in Biden’s final year—showing that firms are reshoring production and positively responding to President Trump’s trade policies,” the White House’s statement said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
