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In California, crops have gone unharvested, as farmworkers stay home out of fear of immigration raids. Internal Revenue Service workers in Kansas City have found themselves jockeying over desks after remote workers were abruptly ordered back to the office. Tariffs are putting the brakes on hiring.

President Donald Trump won a second term with a promise to support the working-class voters who backed him. But many workers now feel less secure and find their jobs harder to do — squeezed by immigration crackdowns, federal layoffs and funding cuts, and weakened labor protections.

The uncertainty fueled by these policies, combined with Trump’s trade wars, is beginning to surface in economic data, economists say. The July jobs report, which showed the country had undergone the weakest three months of job growth since the pandemic, was so alarming to Trump that he took the unprecedented step of firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that compiled and released the data.

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Harry Holzer, a Georgetown economist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the difference between today’s uncertainty and past episodes — such as the COVID pandemic and the 2008 housing crash — is that this one is self-inflicted. “All of this uncertainty has been created by Donald Trump and his fairly erratic economic policies,” said Holzer.

Trump’s slash-and-burn tactics have fallen hardest on federal workers facing firings, hiring freezes and deferred-resignation programs and on immigrants threatened by the administration’s intensified arrest and deportation efforts. But economists, workers and labor advocates say the effects have rippled beyond those groups. From restaurants to factories to health care clinics, business owners and workers are operating in an environment of increasing uncertainty and fear.

The Trump administration, for its part, describes his approach to the economy as one that is “prioritizing American workers, who have been undermined by illegal labor and bad trade deals that shipped jobs overseas,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email, adding, “The President’s immigration enforcement efforts and trade deals have........

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