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Chair Walberg, Ranking Member Scott, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
My name is Heidi Shierholz, and I am an economist and the president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C. EPI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-wage workers in economic policy discussions. EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America, proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-wage workers, and assesses policies with respect to how well they further those goals. I previously served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.
In considering the topic of “unleashing” America’s workforce and strengthening the economy, I make three main points in this testimony: (1) the Trump-Vance administration has inherited unquestionably the strongest economy for an incoming administration in a quarter-century;1 (2) that strength was driven in large part by economic policy choices by the prior administration and Congress; and (3) the Trump-Vance administration agenda will be profoundly destructive to the incomes and economic security for both the most vulnerable families and the broad middle class. The administration is aiming to gut key income support and safety net programs that provide direct support to tens of millions of working families, and the chaos and uncertainty they are intentionally sowing with reckless power grabs over key economic institutions will likely cause an economic crisis unless it is stopped.
The basic facts about the economy that the Trump-Vance administration inherited
The availability of jobs and the growth in real wages (i.e., growth in the purchasing power of wages after accounting for inflation) are where the rubber meets the road as far as “the economy” goes for working people. On both of these fronts, the economy that the Trump-Vance administration inherited is extremely strong.
In January 2025, when the Trump-Vance administration took office, the unemployment rate was 4.0%, and had been at or below 4.2% since November 2021. The last time the United States saw unemployment that low, for that long, was more than a half century ago. Further, the share of prime-age adults (25–54 years old) with a job was higher during January 2025 than at any time during the business cycle from 2007 to 2019, and near its highest rate in a quarter-century. The labor force participation rate of prime-age adults was also higher than at any time during the business cycle from 2007–2019, and the labor force participation of prime-age women was near its all-time high. Finally, job growth averaged 168,000 per month over the 12 months ending January 2025—a very healthy pace of growth, particularly considering how close the economy is to full employment (when job growth would be expected to slow since there is no longer a large employment gap to be filled).
The purchasing power of workers’ wages, after taking inflation into account, was higher in 2024 than it was at the most recent business cycle peak in 2019 or any point before that. (In other words, real wages were higher in 2024 than they were in 2019 or any point before that.) Further, this was true all across the wage distribution—for low-wage workers, middle-wage workers, and high-wage workers. In fact, bucking the trend of the business cycles of the prior 40 years, wage growth since 2019 has been stronger among low-wage workers than at any other point in the wage distribution. Real wage growth for workers at the 10th percentile, for example, rose by 3.4% annually between 2019 and 2024, for a total increase of 18.2%—the fastest five-year stretch of real wage growth for this group since data started being collected in the 1970s. (snip-MORE)
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