From layoff to relocation

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Kimberly Adams (0:31)

This morning, we get the federal government's monthly snapshot of the labor market, and some folks who left the federal government because of doge cuts are still trying to find their way.

From Marketplace in Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams. In just about an hour and a half, we'll get the monthly federal jobs report for September. Earlier this week, private payroll processor ADP released its monthly jobs report. By ADP's count, the private sector added 90,000 jobs in September, which was much better than expected, and more than double the amount of jobs that came in August. For more context on ADP's number and what that could signal for today's big jobs report, here's Diane Swank, chief economist at KPMG.

Diane Swank (1:13)

Well, what's important, first of all, is that the ADP report was redesigned so it no longer is a forecast necessarily of what's happening in the official jobs data, but it does have a lot of great information in it. And even though we had that pick up in employment, it was heavily concentrated in health care and social assistance and in leisure and hospitality. Those are two sectors that were hit hardest by the loss in temporary protected status workers, and now they're trying to backfill holes that happened as those workers lost their temporary protected status. So it's good that we saw the gains, and we did see some manufacturing and construction gains due to AI build out as well, but it really was pretty narrowly focused and dependent on those two sectors.

Kimberly Adams (2:02)

There are multiple reports out of Europe this morning that EU leaders are weighing releasing some of the bloc's strategic oil reserves to help ease global energy prices. The Trump administration has been pressuring European countries to do just that, threatening a potential US diesel export ban if Europe doesn't release some of its diesel reserves. The news about ongoing talks is sending oil prices down this morning. But bringing all this news to the gas station, AAA's national average for a gallon of regular unleaded is currently about $4.40 a gallon. Diesel is at $6.37 a gallon.

In 2025, the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk began slashing budgets across government agencies.

One of the agencies significantly affected was the National Institute of Health. There were layoffs, funding cuts, and frozen grants that left the scientific research community startled and looking for answers. That leads us to the next installment of our series, Clocked Out.

SPEAKER_1 (3:20)

My name is Montrose Fell. I'm from Bethesda, Maryland. I'm 22 years old. I am moving out of the biotechnology industry and pursuing international relocation to Canada.

So, I started the year and was recruited in January. I worked for that company for about six months when I was laid off with no notice. I was really shocked at the time that I received my layoff notice. I got it on the last day of a paid vacation, and I just felt like immediately like I was scrambling to try and figure out what I was going to do next. This industry's proximity to NIH and the Doge staffing cuts that took place that really flooded the market with overqualified people, and then people were kind of shut out from jobs that they would have otherwise been able to do. I made the decision not to look for a new job and to pursue other goals that I had.

So I wanted to go into something that was more aligned with conservation biology, and I felt that the current scientific climate in the United States was not one that I felt like I would thrive in that career. I think a lot of Americans like the idea of moving to Canada, and I didn't want to bank so much on the systems changing or being able to be rebuilt quickly. So right now, a lot of what I've been doing is planning my relocation.

I felt a bit self-conscious talking to my friends when they ask me about how my life is going because they all have jobs or are full-time students right now, and right now, I am doing neither. I will start school next fall, and I'm planning on taking a gap year to travel. Given that I felt that my first career choice came from a place of idealism at the time, I sometimes worry that I'm doing that again. But knowing that I've done it once, it's also made me more confident that if I need to pivot again in the future, I can. That's something that I think I've really carried over as a student of the pandemic and graduating into a time that was so tumultuous for the world.