Last summer's teen hiring market was the worst on record. Alarming report shows it's about to get even worse — here's why.



For generations, landing a summer job has been a traditional American rite of passage. Whether working at a local ice cream shop, a neighborhood grocery store, or an amusement park, teenagers have their very first taste of being a part of the workforce. However, a new report shows that teens are facing the toughest hiring market since the government began tracking the data in 1948.

The traditional summer job that generations of American teenagers have relied on is facing its grimmest outlook in nearly eight decades.

'That is exactly the kind of work teens depend on.'

Challenger, Gray, and Christmas — a Chicago-based workforce consulting company — released a recent forecast revealing the troubling summer employment outlook that teens are grappling with.

Citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the report noted that last summer's teen hiring total plummeted to its lowest level since the government began tracking the data in 1948. In 2025, teen summer hiring hit rock bottom at 801,000 positions — the worst figure in the 77-year history of tracking by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, this summer's job forecast for teenagers is even more dire. In an alarming projection, Challenger, Gray, and Christmas warns that employers will offer teens 790,000 jobs in May, June, and July 2026.

The previous documented low point occurred in 1949 during post-war demobilization, when teen hiring dropped to 932,000. In 2010, the total number of teenage jobs fell to 960,000, when the economic recovery from the Great Recession dragged on.

Fortune reported that federal data shows that approximately one-third of 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States were employed last summer, noting that it is "down from a peak of about 60% in the late 1970s."

The Wall Street Journal reported that applications for New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program this year have already shattered 2025's record of 200,000 candidates competing for just 100,000 slots.

Meanwhile, advertisements for summer camp counselor positions on the Indeed jobs board have crashed by nearly 30% year-over-year, according to the WSJ.

"Last summer was the weakest summer for teen hiring we have ever recorded," said Andy Challenger, labor and workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray, and Christmas.

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Challenger stressed, "What is striking is that it happened without a recession."

The report by Challenger, Gray, and Christmas cited "rising inflation, climbing oil prices, and a broadly cautious hiring environment" as factors contributing to the historically weak teen summer job forecast. The report also said artificial intelligence, automation, and older workers staying in the workforce later have hurt job prospects for teens.

"Inflation and rising fuel costs are squeezing the same households and small businesses that hire teens, such as amusement parks, restaurants, retailers, and summer camps," Challenger continued. "When margins tighten, summer hirers will wait for demand to dictate hiring."

Challenger said, "We predicted a quiet summer last year, and it played out even quieter than expected. The dynamics that drove that slowdown — cost pressures, automation, employers waiting to see how consumer demand holds up — are all still in place, and in some cases they’ve intensified."

Non-seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that there were 5,193,000 employed workers ages 16 to 19 in April. The report said the total is a noticeable drop from the figure from April 2025, which saw 5,487,000 teen workers on payrolls.

Challenger pointed out, "When fewer teens are working in April, the late-spring catch-up usually doesn’t close the gap. June will be the most important month to watch, but the trajectory is already pointing down."

Challenger, Gray, and Christmas reported, "Entertainment and leisure, which led the seasonal categories most relevant to teen hiring last year with 28,000 announced plans, has announced only 8,261 hiring plans through April of this year, a 70% drop."

Challenger added, "The collapse in entertainment and leisure hiring announcements is one of the clearest signals we have for the summer."

Challenger said jobs in places like theme parks, resorts, hotels, and events will "run leaner this year."

"That is exactly the kind of work teens depend on," Challenger stated.

The report said teenagers could find employment opportunities in agriculture, hospitality, and food service. The report claimed that in areas with crackdowns on illegal immigration could help American teens secure jobs.

"Tighter labor supply in certain regions, particularly those most affected by ongoing immigration enforcement actions, continues to push some employers to lean more heavily on local teen workers," the report proclaimed.

Challenger declared, "In the places where labor remains tight, teens can be a real solution."

According to NewsNation, teenagers could find a "few bright spots" in summer employment, including lifeguards and working in retail.

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Congress may be quietly seeking to integrate US and Israeli militaries — but critics have taken notice



The House Armed Services Committee released its first draft of the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization bill last week.

Section 224, a provision buried hundreds of pages into the $1.15 trillion defense policy legislation that outlines the "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," has generated some controversy on the fringes of Capitol Hill.

'This provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship.'

Committee member Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) is among those who rushed to characterize section 224 as benign, stating that it amounts to a "security agreement" that "will allow for the US to leverage advanced Israeli technologies."

Some, however, have expressed concerns that the initiative will effectively mean a politically consequential integration of the U.S. and Israeli militaries along with their respective industrial supports.

The legislative proposal

Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA draft would have the secretary of war designate a Pentagon official to oversee the synchronization of "cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation."

The designee would, among other things,

  • identify Israeli-origin or jointly developed technologies that the U.S. could integrate into its systems and programs;
  • facilitate the transition of such technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;
  • establish "frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry"; and
  • promote "joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies."

The section clarifies that the "cooperative efforts" pursued under this technology initiative can be carried out through numerous domains including: counter-unmanned systems; anti-tunneling and subterranean threats; missile and air defense technologies; AI; directed energy; cyber warfare; biotechnology and biomanufacturing; network integration; and defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.

Backlash

Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, claimed in a recent analysis for Responsible Statecraft that "if fully enacted, this proposal would provide a higher level of military-industrial integration than the U.S. has with any other country in the world."

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While acknowledging that the U.S. has worked closely "with its NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains, most notably via the Defence Production Action Plan," Freeman said that section 224 would not only "fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future" but afford the foreign power "the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S."

Beyond potentially setting the stage for more Israeli influence over American politics and fusing together the two nations' military-industrial complexes at a time when the majority of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, Freeman — echoing a colleague at the Quincy Institute — suggested that the initiative will shield the relationship from public scrutiny by migrating it from a visible aid vote in Congress "into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal."

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Pentagon did not respond to Blaze News' requests for comment.

Responding to Freeman's report, departing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted, "If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor."

"We are a sovereign country," Massie added in a post Rep. Van Orden suggested was the "dumbest possible take."

Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said that he will introduce an amendment in committee to axe section 224. Khanna noted further that "Trump can't kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social."

A New Policy, the PAC founded in 2024 by a pair of Biden staffers who quit over the administration's support for Israel, is campaigning against section 224.

"At a policy level, this provision would flip the script on the current bilateral relationship, shifting the leverage we currently hold because of our security assistance to Israel over to the Government of Israel who would be able to hold key [Department of Defense] capabilities hostage through the integration of Israeli technologies into the DOD supply chain," states the PAC's template letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee. "Section 224 also assumes a commonality of national security interests between Israel and the U.S., which, as the current conflict with Iran clearly demonstrates, does not exist."

Code Pink, the leftist group co-founded by former Democrat political activist Jodie Evans, has also seized upon section 224 as a cause du jour, calling upon Congress to reject "US integration with the Israeli military."

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The State of the Union is Trump’s chance to reset deportations



At the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t mince words. He told European leaders that mass migration is not, was not, and will not become “some fringe concern of little consequence.” It was and remains a crisis that is transforming and destabilizing societies across the West.

Rubio also made the point that should be obvious but too often goes unsaid: Controlling who enters a country — and how many people enter it — is not xenophobia. It is not hatred. It is a basic act of national sovereignty. Failing to do it is not merely a policy mistake. It is an abdication of one of government’s first duties to its own people and an urgent threat to social order and civilizational stability.

We need to confront sanctuary employers, sanctuary farms, and sanctuary factories.

That is bold. It is also correct.

Yet special interests continue to pressure President Trump to abandon his promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” into a much smaller project focused only on “the worst of the worst.”

Violent criminal illegal aliens must be removed, and the administration was right to begin there. Public safety comes first.

But that was always the opener. It was never the endgame.

The American people did not vote for President Trump because he promised a narrow immigration enforcement strategy. They voted for the restoration of the rule of law. They voted for what the president himself promised: to deport the illegal aliens Joe Biden unlawfully allowed to enter the United States.

The mas -deportation coalition, of which I am a proud member, exists to help the president accomplish that goal.

Two hundred thousand or even 300,000 interior removals per year may sound significant. Put it beside an illegal population that could approach 20 million, however, and the number shrinks fast. At the current pace, the math does not get you to the largest deportation operation in American history over four years.

President Trump needs help keeping his promise, and he needs a strategy calibrated to the scale of the problem.

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When President Eisenhower enforced immigration law in the 1950s, he did not limit enforcement to select criminal categories. The message was clear: Unlawful presence would not be tolerated. That clarity changed behavior. People left because they knew they had broken the law and would face consequences if they stayed.

That is the kind of clarity we need now.

It means expanding worksite enforcement, not merely fighting over sanctuary cities. We need to confront sanctuary employers, sanctuary farms, and sanctuary factories.

It means taking on industries that rely on and exploit illegal labor at the expense of American workers and their families. It means making clear that unlawful presence in the United States carries consequences — not selectively imposed, but consistently and uniformly applied.

As someone who led ICE and CBP under President Trump in his first term, I can say this with confidence: The machinery and capability exist to achieve 1 million interior removals by the end of 2026.

The real question is political will.

Opponents of the president’s campaign promise are trying to box him into a narrower and narrower enforcement lane. Special interests, campaign consultants, and media talking heads want enforcement to stall — and then to end in amnesty.

If enforcement remains confined to this narrow lane and eventually grinds to a halt, amnesty will come next.

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The State of the Union is the president’s golden opportunity to make clear to supporters, detractors, and, above all, the American people that he intends to fulfill the promise he made on the campaign trail.

It is time to move to phase two: enforcement at scale, without fear or favor.

That may sound bold to some. I know firsthand that it can be done — and must be done.

The American people returned President Trump to the White House after he made that promise. They will reward him with a historic legacy if he keeps it.

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