Layoffs Surge to Nearly 20-Year High as Job Openings Plummet

Donald Trump’s economy has led to the worst January in job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009.

U.S.-based employers laid off 108,435 employees last month, three times as many as in December and twice as many as January 2025, according to a monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that helps executives transition to new jobs. The country hasn’t had a January this bad in seven years, the report said.

Two companies are responsible for 40 percent of these job losses: Amazon, which cut 16,000 jobs, and UPS, which cut 30,000 jobs. The cuts are even related: UPS’s cuts are connected to how it is winding down a delivery agreement with Amazon.

The most layoffs were seen in five industries: transportation, technology, health care, chemical manufacturing, and financial.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer, in a statement. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less than optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

The report attributes 30,784 of the job losses to ending contracts, such as that of UPS. Market and economic conditions led to 28,392 layoffs, 20,044 were caused by restructuring, and 12,738 were due to closures. AI was responsible for 7,624 job cuts, and tariffs were only attributable to 294 last month.

Meanwhile, job creation did not come close to mitigating these layoffs. The payroll processing firm ADP announced only 22,000 jobs were created last month, the weakest numbers in three months and the worst January since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Most of those job gains came from hiring in the health care industry, and came after 2025 had the weakest annual job growth in 22 years. Unemployment is also up, with 231,000 claims filed in the last week of January, an eight-week high, according to the Department of Labor.

All of this belies Trump’s claims that everything is going well, and that his policies are good for American businesses and workers. His administration has resorted to pushing fake statistics to prop up their claims, but Trump can’t cover up the fact that more and more Americans are struggling to afford basic needs. All of this bad news is self-inflicted, as Trump has sabotaged an economy that was actually much better under Biden.