(NewsNation) — Friday’s jobs report echoed a now-familiar theme: The labor market is cooling — slowly but steadily.

U.S. employers added a solid 139,000 jobs last month despite uncertainty over President Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs, new Labor Department data shows. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.2%.

Harvard economist Jason Furman wrote that it was “a boring jobs report, in a good way,” noting that it’s “hard to see any adverse impact of tariffs on real economy.”

Hiring was slower in May compared to April’s revised total of 147,000, but businesses are still adding workers. Increasingly, though, it depends on the sector.

“If you’re a doctor or a nurse or bartender, you’re probably feeling better in this environment than a software engineer or federal employee,” Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, wrote in an analysis.

Most of last month’s job growth came from the health care and social assistance sector, which added 78,000 positions, followed by leisure and hospitality, which added 48,000.

Other sectors largely remained flat, and some, like the federal government and manufacturing, shed jobs.

Stahle said there are now clear trends in the data: “Even if the train is chugging forward, more and more people are getting left behind at the station.”

Another potential concern: the labor force participation rate declined 0.2 percentage points last month, suggesting that more people may have exited the job market entirely.

There’s also growing anxiety among recent college grads, who haven’t had this much trouble landing jobs in years. Some reports warn this could become the new normal, as artificial intelligence takes over many former entry-level roles.

ADP report underscores labor market slowdown

A separate report from payroll processing firm ADP on Wednesday further confirmed the job market is cooling but not collapsing. ADP’s data showed that private sector firms added just 37,000 jobs in May, the lowest level since March 2023.

“After a strong start to the year, hiring is losing momentum,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a news release.

Though the Labor Department and ADP reports draw from different data sources and often diverge, both indicated a hiring slowdown in goods-producing industries such as manufacturing.

Both reports also caught President Trump’s attention, who used them as an opportunity to call on Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.

“[Powell] is costing our Country a fortune. Borrowing costs should be MUCH LOWER!!!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday morning.

But according to experts, there’s nothing in the latest jobs data that suggests rate cuts are coming soon.

“I’ve long thought that the only rate cuts this year will come from a rapidly declining labor market. This is not it,” Furman wrote on X.

Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick also expects the central bank to remain in wait-and-see mode: “The largely as-expected report keeps the Federal Reserve on hold for the forthcoming June announcement, and perhaps for late July as well.”

That means financing costs on car loans, credit cards and mortgages will likely remain elevated, at least for the near term.

The Fed’s ultimate goal is to keep rates high enough, and for long enough, to cool inflation without pushing the country into a recession.