A job center in 2019 (Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock.com)
A Monday analysis from MS NOW revealed the employment trend that is helping to prop up Donald Trump's already meager job growth numbers, and it has more to do with an aging population than his undelivered manufacturing boom.
As of the most recent jobs report from last week, the U.S. has added around 359,000 jobs since Trump returned to the White House a little over a year ago. As MS NOW data journalist Philip Bump noted on Monday, while positive, that is still a far cry from the numbers during Joe Biden's presidency, which matched that figure every month.
Trump and his allies have attempted to spin this stalling growth by noting that around 600,000 private sector jobs have been created, and that the overall number is being dragged down by the massive cuts his administration made to government employees.
Despite Trump's pledge to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., Bump's findings show that almost all the new jobs under his watch came from the "service" industry. Digging deeper, he found that "anomalous growth" in one specific sector of the service industry, healthcare, driven by a growing portion of the population: "old people."
"That’s a theme to the growth seen in 2025. The year saw increases in home health care aides, ambulatory health care services, hospitals and nursing/residential care facilities — all jobs related to taking care of people’s health," Bump explained. "This is a continuation of a pattern. Since 2000, the number of people working in individual and family services is up 300 percent. The number working in retirement and assisted living facilities has more than doubled."
He continued: "So what’s going on? Well, one central factor here is that Americans keep getting older. The baby boom extended from 1946 to 1964. In 2011, the oldest boomers began hitting age 65. The density of elderly people in the population began to skyrocket, pushing demand for health care aides and (lagging a bit) nursing home and retirement care."
The surge in population density caused by the baby boom has caused similar surges in demand for specific goods and services throughout the decades, Bump noted. When the generation was at its youngest, diaper demand exploded. A few years later, demand for grade school teachers also exploded.
As the healthcare needs of the increasingly elderly baby boomers increase, Bump predicted that they will continue to drive demand for healthcare workers to service them. However, he also noted that this is not a trend that can continue forever, implying that demand will begin to wane as the generation passes away, with the younger generations not replacing the elderly population at the same rate.
"Put another way, senior care — meaning health care and housing, as the 2025 numbers show — will continue to be a driver of job growth," Bump concluded. "Until, as with diapers and school teachers previously, they aren’t."