When American politicians talk about economics, it is typically in simple terms of raw wage growth that gives Americans more money to spend, but the Trump administration’s outlook on economics pairs that goal with family-centric prosperity.
“Policy discussions often treat work either as just a means to an end — a paycheck — or as a terrible monster to be vanquished,” the “Work Means More Than Making a Living: Labor, Challenges, and Opportunity,” a chapter of the 2026 Economic Report of the President obtained by The Federalist, states.
“The dominant cultural narrative celebrates retirement as liberation and views unemployment through a narrow, materialist lens — that the only real issue in joblessness is a lack of money,” it adds. “But what if this framework fundamentally misapprehends the role work plays in human flourishing?”
Meaningful, full-time employment, the chapter states, has societal impact on marriage, family formation, health and well-being, and building interpersonal relationships.
Work has “benefits with critical implications for living well,” including better health and longer lifespan, increases happiness and decreases depression, develops knowledge and skills, and “provides a webbing of social connection and community,” the report states.
But it also makes clear that it is not just any job that is capable of creating centers of meaning, purpose, and human relationships in America.
“We’re not just trying to juke the stats by creating gig economy jobs, but we want the sort of investments and sort of economic growth that creates meaningful employment that leads to the recreation or the revitalization of American communities and American families,” a White House official told The Federalist, pointing to the reshoring of jobs lost overseas during NAFTA and other deals that gutted industry in America and investing in manufacturing.
“Every month, millions of Americans remain disconnected from the workforce. The economic costs are measurable in gross domestic product and tax revenue,” the report states. “But the human costs — measured in years of life lost, relationships severed, and skills atrophied — reveal that the role of work is far more fundamental than economic exchange.”
Work Is Essential To Family Formation
Marriage is essential to happiness and developing wealth, but work can be an important social indicator that leads to marriage and family formation.
“The workplace is not just where people earn money but also where they form the relationships that define their communities and families,” the report states. “Policies that treat unemployment as merely an income problem miss this deeper social architecture that work provides.”
The “social infrastructure” created by the workplace is a key component to family formation as well as the social cohesion in a community, according to the report.
At an individual level, job separation “triggers sustained social isolation,” because the infrastructure suddenly disappears. Loneliness, which is different than depression, “emerges gradually and persists.” But beyond the individual, the social cohesion of the community is affected because, “when your colleague loses their job, you lose a colleague. When enough people lose work, the entire community fabric begins to fray.”
But there are cascading effects on job losses as well, including a “collapsing marriage market,” particularly for men without college educations, because the loss of income makes them poor prospects for women seeking to marry.
“The results are fewer marriages, more single-parent households, and declining fertility — a cascade of social disconnections that begin with economic displacement,” the report states.
No Work Destroys Health
The report uses RAND’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS) which has data from 1999-2022 to break down left-wing narratives around the evils of work, or the utopian ideology about escaping it and transcending beyond the need for it, to be able to focus on human flourishing.
“Perhaps no finding challenges economists’ assumptions about work’s value more starkly than its effect on mortality. If work were merely a source of stress to be escaped, one would expect job separation to improve health outcomes and reduce mortality,” the report states. “The evidence shows precisely the opposite.”
The data shows that workers who had been displaced through mass layoffs have a 50-100 percent higher mortality rate, taking an average of 1-1.5 years off someone’s life. That loss of time also has an economic impact, costing between $300,000-$500,000, based on Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates on the value of statistical life, which is about $13.6 million.
The report also makes clear that the loss in jobs is not due to prior health conditions or performance, but rather displacement through “plant closures and downsizing that had nothing to do with individual circumstances.”
“The excess deaths span multiple causes — strokes, heart attacks, accidents, suicide, and complications from substance abuse — suggesting that job loss triggers a cascade of physical and mental health deterioration,” it states, adding that even healthy, physically able people who choose to retire at the earliest Social Security age threshold of 62 and have their income replaced by the program have a higher mortality risk because of the loss of work. The phenomenon is most pronounced in men, who are are more likely to “derive their identity from work.”
Beyond mortality, work also reduces obesity, and early retirement make is 12 percent more likely for men to become obese within two to four years. The inherent health benefits of work both maintains future work prospects and reduces other health and financial issues brought on by obesity. Medical expenses for the obese are about twice that of nonobese people, or about $2,505 more per person per year.
Work benefits mental health as well — both making people happier and reducing depression, the report states. It points to a study that challenges the idea that people “work for the weekend,” or “classical economic theory, which treats labor as ‘disutility’ — a cost paid in lost leisure to obtain income,” finding rather that people may tell themselves work is “drudgery,” but that, paradoxically, people actually find more fulfillment in being productive.
Unemployment can lead to heightened depression that can last six years or more, while retirement is more gradual, but still increases depression. According to one study, the amount of money one would need to offset depression caused by unemployment or retirement is in the tens of thousands annually.
“The implication for policy is clear: rapid reemployment, made possible by flexible labor markets that allow quick matching between workers and jobs, should be a priority,” the report states.
Rapid reemployment would also benefit not just skills development, but the cognitive function that comes along with it. According to the report, those out of work and not required to learn new skills or adapt to new job demands actually reverse skill development, and that retirement “causally accelerates cognitive decline.”
Labor Market Problems
The report points to several issues with the labor market that are keeping Americans out of work, and unable to benefit from the financial, social, and health benefits of having a job.
There is “declining labor force participation, demographic stagnation, critical skill shortages, and a struggling human capital pipeline.”
Welfare and Disability Abuse
Social welfare programs create powerful disincentives to work, while there is a “mismatch between workers’ skills and employer needs,” as manual labor has become less prominent in the job market, and technical skills are winning the day. The issue does not call for more people with college degrees, but rather an increase in vocational education and apprenticeship opportunities to meet employer demand.
The “mismatch” may be an easier problem to solve than the “severe disincentives created by the welfare system” which has “consistently expanded to a larger class of able-bodied adults, particularly with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which added tens of millions of able-bodied adults to the free, government-funded health program,” the report states.
The welfare programs actually punish people for finding work or getting paid more, which “works as a barrier trapping the poor, effectively creating an incentive for them to remain underemployed and disconnected from the ladder of opportunity,” it added.
However, the report says the expansion of the welfare state’s effects on work are “marginal disincentives” compared to the “abuse of the disability program,” which has also expanded enormously, driven primarily by the ability to get money for conditions that are “subjective and impossible to verify” like muscle fatigue and tingling sensation, or by claims of mental health disorders, which apparently includes fatigue, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, and irritability, which the report notes are “criteria many people could meet at the end of any workday.”
Disability, like welfare, is a trap, as fewer than one percent of those on disability return to work each year, which, beyond the financial effects both on the individual and their contribution to the economy more broadly, the disincentive to work “permanently severs people from the social connections, sense of purpose, and psychological benefits that work provides.”
The Trump administration has proposed that the programs should no longer be means-tested, since that approach disincentivizes work because an increase in income can mean a reduction in benefits.
The benefits need to be “contingent on employment, rather than solely on income,” the report states, “transforming the welfare system from a trap into a spring board.” Some of that thinking was put into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, where able-bodied Medicaid expansion recipients have to work at least 80 hours per month, and work requirements for those receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits was expanded to adults up to 64 years old.
The report recommends expanding the Medicaid work requirements to all recipients, as opposed to just the expansion enrollees, and notes there are broader categories of welfare entrapment that need to be disassembled.
“Because SNAP eligibility often serves as the gateway to other programs — automatically qualifying recipients for reduced utility rates, free school lunches, and streamlined Medicaid enrollment — these work requirements create a cascading effect across the entire welfare system,” the report states. “Public housing, homelessness assistance, and energy and heating assistance programs do not feature any meaningful community engagement requirements. These are missed opportunities.”
“Demographic Crisis”
The declining birth rate in America is quickly becoming a “demographic crisis” where every 100 people will only have 63 grandchildren, which will eventually make programs like Social Security insolvent because of the inability of a smaller working population to pay for a much larger retired population.
Some of the causes of low fertility come from unexpected places, like the legal requirement to use car seats for young children acting as a barrier for some families to have more than two children because many cars cannot fit more than two car seats. According to the report, a study found that requirement alone prevents thousands of births per year.
Another barrier is the high cost of childcare, which the report notes “exceeds in-state college tuition in many states” and can take up 20 to 30 percent of the median household income. The Trump administration wants to simultaneously increase fertility and labor force participation by increasing access to childcare.
For example, government regulation creates arbitrary caregiver-to-child ratios that forces in-home childcare to have one caregiver per three children, whereas commercial childcare centers are allowed to have one caregiver per 10 or even 12 children, “without evidence that home-based care is inherently less safe.”
Overregulation is also to blame for limiting the kinds of credentials required to be allowed to do childcare in the first place, as well as some zoning rules that block at-home daycares from being created — both of which the Trump administration says need to be more flexible.
The high cost of housing is also a contributor to the demographic crisis, with more affordable housing increasing fertility by 33 percent, one cited study found. Expanding maternity leave also increases fertility by 14 to 21 percent, the report states.
More Skills, Less College
By 2030, the U.S. is projected to have a deficit of 2.1 million workers in critical industries, according to the report.
Some of the skills missing in the U.S. labor market are in heavy industry, like ship building and aerospace engineering, or technicians for semiconductor fabrication and pharmaceuticals, the report notes. It is particularly concerning, because the lack of skills means relying on foreign countries to make up for demand, which is “particularly acute in rare earth processing and nuclear engineering, where China dominates global expertise.”
There is also a “tiny pool of talented specialists” for artificial intelligence and cybersecurity globally, who are not being trained in American universities. That creates a “strategic vulnerabilities whereby workforce shortages translate directly into dependence on adversarial nations for critical capabilities.”
The American education system is not preparing workers for the kinds of jobs needed by the economy and for national security purposes, while government programs and institutions continue to incentivize four-year degrees over skilled labor.
One problem with addressing the skills shortage, the report states, is employers do not want to fund training over fears their employees will be poached by a competitor, and government training programs lack industry connections and market incentives to be effective. “The result is a standoff where critical sectors remain understaffed while millions of workers lack pathways to well-paying careers,” the report states.
The Trump administration suggests aligning the incentives of students and schools with industry, and keeping track of those by mandating outcome reporting for training programs. Students going into both four-year universities and skilled trades do not have enough monetary data to incentivize them to choose one career over another, but requiring training programs to publish that data could encourage students to choose careers that industry requires.
One portal, TrainingProviderResults.gov, already exists, but it is entirely voluntary and therefore lacking most information.
Another policy proposal from the Trump administration is creating a Strategic Higher Education Investment for Essential Labor Development (SHIELD) program that incentivizes students to find careers in industries critical to national security. It would include financial support for high achievers, a service commitment to go into a critical industry after training (or repay the grant with interest), and only give grants to institutions that prove they are performing in a way that meets the needs of industry.
The “Center of Social Policy”
The Trump administration wants to “reestablish work as the center of social policy.”
Purely economic incentives and solutions do not address the full scope of the issues with unemployment, as “the nation’s workers face a human crisis: millions of citizens are disconnected not just from paychecks but also from the purpose, community, and personal growth that work provides.”
“Workforce investment is about managing the nation’s most important resource: human talent and potential,” it continues. “When the country fails at this task, the costs compound across generations. Today’s nonworkers become tomorrow’s missing parents, unable to model the dignity of work for their children. They become missing innovators, their talents never developed or applied. They become missing citizens, disconnected from the shared project of building prosperity.”
