Julia Pollack

In the first Trump administration, we had non-inflationary growth.

And you can do that with policies that don't throw fuel on the fire of demand and restrict supply, but do the exact opposite.

So through deregulation, through reshoring incentives, we're going to see this labor market take off again, and in a non-inflationary way.

So the economy shed manufacturing jobs for about two years before President Trump took office again.

This latest report shows the largest increase in construction jobs in over a year.

And that's really the front end of those investments in mining and energy and manufacturing.

And they're a signal that manufacturing job growth will pick up.

So, okay.

Well, the AI boom is driving huge demand for workers in the skills trades, in advanced manufacturing, and of course, workers with AI skills.

And it is our job at the Labor Department to ensure that US workers are prepared for those jobs of the future.

For the first time, labor policy and education policy are pulling in the same direction.

We've aligned labor and education for the first time ever, and we are now focusing very heavily on getting workers access to job-connected training that sets them up for in-demand jobs and that doesn't push them to expensive degrees that leave them with nowhere to go.

I have no idea.

You'd have to ask the president that.

Well, I think there is tremendous amount of work to do there, tracking AI's labor impact, improving the timeliness, the granularity, the accuracy of the data.

And I have, at the Labor Department, made it my priority to push forward a very aggressive labor market data modernization agenda that puts workers and learners first and gives them more access to the data collected on them.

So, right now, I love partnering with the BLS on all of those kinds of initiatives, and I am happy to serve in whatever role the president sees fit.

I have no idea, but I think that whoever comes in has a very clear mandate from the president to put workers and learners at the center of what we do, to change the data paradigm to a real-time data paradigm, and to make sure that the data is accurate and has the utmost integrity.