Elizabeth Preza

Companies are “looking to stay lean into 2026” as a new “corporate playbook” reveals hiring freezes in major industries, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“You’re going to see a lot of wait and see,” chief executive of staffing company Kelly Services Chris Layden told the Journal. “Some of the looming uncertainty will mean that we’re going to continue to see an investment in capital over people.”

According to the report, “66 percent of leaders surveyed” at a recent gathering in Midtown Manhattan “said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year. Only a third indicated they planned to hire.” This comes as the “unemployment rate those to 4.6 percent in November, its highest in four years.”

“We’re close to zero job growth. That’s not a healthy labor market,” Federal Reserve governor Christopher Waller said at the gathering. “When I go around and talk to CEOs around the country, everybody’s telling me, ‘Look, we’re not hiring because we’re waiting to try to figure out what happens with AI. What jobs can we replace? What jobs do we don’t?’”

“Everybody’s afraid for their jobs. I’m dead serious,” said Waller.

Per the Journal, “some of the weakest industries for new job openings include those in well-paid fields such as data analytics, software development, marketing and entertainment, she said. Job postings are stronger in industries such as healthcare and construction.”

President Donald Trump on Friday touted a graph showing plummeting federal employment as “Big News for the USA!”

“The post cited jobs numbers from earlier this month showing federal employment at its lowest in more than a decade, down 271,000 jobs since he took office,” MS Now reports. “The Trump administration casts those numbers in a wholly positive light, as indicative of a strong private sector, even as the labor market stalls."

Read the full report at the Wall Street Journal.

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Veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove on Saturday delivered a stark warning for President Donald Trump and the GOP as the 2026 midterm elections loom.

“The president will end this year at the lowest approval rating in modern times for a president … in the first year after his inauguration," Rove told Fox News. "He has got to get those numbers up."

“I am convinced a large part of it is going to be patiently explaining what it is he has done, explaining what is he wants to do particularly with regards to healthcare in a way that the American people can put their hand around it,” he added.

Rove urged the president to “lower the expectations, and over-deliver” in his messaging to the American public.

“Under-promise and over-deliver ought to be the goal of the next year,” Rove said.

“Americans are not feeling the economy is great. For him to stand up and say — as he did first in Pennsylvania, then in North Carolina — that ‘everything is great,’ it does not resonate with the felt experience of ordinary American families,” Rove told Fox News.

“Second-term midterms are never happy ones for the president except in 1998’s for Bill Clinton when the Republicans overplayed their hand. And the first term for George W. Bush, but those have been a rare moment midterm election has worked to the advantage of the party in power,” he noted.

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Employees at the U.S. Department of State are hesitant “to give advice that the political appointees might not want to hear” as officials "become guarded about what they say" under President Donald Trump, multiple former State Department lawyers told HuffPost.

In an article published Saturday, HuffPost reports “a severe and unusual fear of being punished for doing their jobs has spread among staff at the State Department’s legal office, bolstering concerns about how the Trump administration is crafting foreign policy.”

According to the report, lawyers at the Office of the Legal Adviser at State (“L”), fear repercussions “if they suggest the administration’s plans could break domestic or international law.”

The president’s “drastic” international moves — including “strikes on accused drug boats in the waters around South America” — have drawn particular concern among former State Department employees, according to the report.

“It’s really difficult to imagine how any State Department lawyer could sign off on these strikes,” former “L” employee Charlie Trumbull told HuffPost. “That leads me to believe that the normal vetting process for vetting these things is not functioning as it did.”

Trumbull added there’s “much more hesitancy to give advice that the political appointees might not want to hear.”

“We’ve always had a culture where we speak frankly, challenge things and really push ideas to ensure they’re solidly supported,” a former lawyer told HuffPost.

“There’s an underlying fear of … providing advice that wasn’t well-received and then being cut out of a subject, being further and further removed from the job that you spent your career trying to do,” that lawyer added.

According to the report, “L” has experienced “a drastic and uncommon loss of staff since Trump’s second term began.”

Read the full report at HuffPost.

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The popular, two-term Democratic governor of a deep-red state, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, sees an opening for Democrats to turn rural America blue.

Beshear, 47, is considered a moderate, pro-choice Democrat, and won re-election in 2023. Last year he was ranked the second-most popular governor in the U.S.

“Democrats won huge victories up and down the ballot this month,” Governor Beshear wrote in The Washington Post on Monday, “by relentlessly focusing on the pocketbook pressures families across our country are facing.”...

President Donald Trump is praising his own tariffs, declaring that their impacts have yet to be fully felt, and predicting that payments are about to “skyrocket” — just as the holidays approach and Americans are increasingly concerned about being able to pay their bills.

Consumer sentiment has fallen to a near record low, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, noting that views of personal finances are “the dimmest since 2009, and consumers remain frustrated about high prices and weakening incomes.”

“Consumers are anxious about the high cost of living and job security, with the probability of personal job loss climbing to the highest since July 2020,” Bloomberg added....