The United States added 178,000 jobs in March, blowing past expectations and showing a resilient labor market just as the war with Iran began escalating, sending up oil prices.

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The unemployment rate fell to 4.3% last month, down from 4.4%. The gains were concentrated in health care, construction, transportation and warehousing.

Despite the outsized headline figure, there were further indications that the job market remains wobbly. Wage growth declined to 3.5% in March from 3.8% in February, falling short of forecasts.

Jobs report estimates from January and February were also revised, upward and downward respectively. Combined, they show that U.S. payrolls fell by a net 7,000 over those two months.

The labor force participation rate, or the share of the overall population either employed or looking for work, fell to its lowest level since November of 2021.

“While this month’s jobs report delivered an upside surprise, we continue to believe that risks to the labor market remain elevated and higher oil prices from the Iran conflict could prove an additional impediment in the months ahead,” Scott Helfstein, head of investment strategy at Global X financial group, said in a note to clients.

Surveys conducted by the BLS for this report were completed by March 12. At the time, the full brunt of the war had yet to hit the job market.

Three weeks later, gasoline prices have surged to more than $4 a gallon, a level that, if it is sustained, would sap U.S. consumers of hundreds of dollars in annual discretionary income.

On Wednesday, the Atlanta Federal Reserve lowered its real-time gross domestic product estimate to 1.9%, down from more than 3% just before the start of the war.

On Tuesday, the BLS reported the hiring rate in February fell to just 3.1% of the U.S. workforce, a level last recorded in April 2020, as the Covid pandemic bore down.

Job openings also fell in February, though they appear to be stabilizing overall. The rate of layoffs also remains at an all-time low.

Meanwhile, many Americans’ views of the economy and Trump’s handling of it continue to sink to new depths.

A CNN poll out this week found that just 31% of respondents approved of how Trump is managing U.S. economic performance, with just 27% saying they approved of his handling of inflation, down from 44% a year ago. His overall approval rating appears to have stabilized at about 35%.

A debate is now underway about how many jobs the U.S. would need to add each month to keep the unemployment rate — 4.3% as of Friday — stable.

Over the past year, a massive drop in overall immigration to the U.S., coupled with a growing number of baby boomers leaving the workforce, mean fewer overall jobs need to be created for the economy to absorb newcomers to the labor force and keep the overall unemployment rate steady, according to economists with the Dallas Federal Reserve.

That overall number of new jobs needed is known as the “breakeven” employment rate. The economists wrote in a note published this week that the breakeven employment rate now may be close to zero.

If the overall workforce continues to shrink, even fewer new jobs will be needed to incorporate workers entering the labor force, such as recent college graduates or parents who put their careers on hold for a few years.

That won’t necessarily make looking for a job any easier. The median spell of unemployment is now about 2½ months, with the average much longer — about six months. About 25% of all unemployed workers are out of work for at least 27 weeks.

Fourth-generation Iowa farmer Mark Mueller is no stranger to the ups and downs of the agriculture industry. But right now, he thinks America is on the cusp of a farm crisis.

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“I am more concerned now than I have been in my 30 years of farming,” Mueller told NBC News.

Even before the Iran war, Mueller said, many farmers felt they were being squeezed. Consolidation in the fertilizer industry and increased competition from abroad have resulted in higher prices for fertilizer and feed — and smaller returns on Mueller’s corn and soybean crops.

Many farmers who couldn’t pay their bills in recent years went under. In 2025, the number of Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies reached 315, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. That was up 46% from the previous year.

Now, the Iran war is putting even more pressure on farmers.

Before the war, roughly a third of the world’s fertilizer ingredients and a fifth of its oil supplies passed every day through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast. But since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the strait has been effectively closed by Tehran, leaving scores of tankers stranded.

The strait’s closure has driven up global prices for fertilizer and for the diesel fuel that powers most of America’s heavy agricultural equipment.

The double whammy is hitting farmers just as they head into the spring planting season.

“This is that perfect storm where everything comes together and hammers the farmer,” said Mueller, who also serves as the president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

Mueller said his fertilizer supplier was selling a nitrogen fertilizer he needs for $795 per ton on Feb. 22, a few days before the war started. At the end of March, it was $990, Mueller said, a nearly $200 jump in just a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the price he’s paying for diesel has jumped, too. Diesel is now averaging $5.51 nationwide, up from $3.76 right before the war, according to AAA.

Mueller said he got most of the fertilizer he needs for spring before the war — but had to buy some at the higher prices. He’s holding off on purchasing the additional fertilizer he needs for summer, hoping prices will come down.

President Donald Trump’s tariffs have also added to the cost of goods that farmers import from overseas — and frustrated many of the foreign buyers of America’s agricultural products.

“Our government made our life more difficult by walking away from trade deals or instituting tariffs or just basically making our customers angry — our customers being other nations and companies in other nations,” said Mueller.

Lance Lillibridge, a corn and cattle farmer from Vinton, Iowa, told NBC News he plans to use less fertilizer this year.

“I’m probably going to see a reduction in yield,” said Lillibridge. “If there’s not the supply out there, then the price is going to go up.”

If the war continues, the higher prices could ripple through the supply chain and ultimately result in higher prices at the supermarket.

“We’re talking about all the crops and all the food products that we consume on a daily basis,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.

“Anything that is grown and that requires fertilizers, which is most of everything that we consume, is potentially affected by this rise in fertilizer prices,” said Daco. “And as a result, we may see these prices rise rapidly across grocery stores in the U.S.”

Take corn, for example. If corn prices spike, then feeding cattle becomes more expensive for many farmers. Plus cattle farmers are also dealing with the higher fuel prices. The cost of beef has already hit record highs — in part from shrinking cattle herds and drought — and it could surge even more.

“I worry about how much more consumers will continue to pay for beef,” said Will Harris, a fourth-generation cattle farmer in Bluffton, Georgia. “I think that I can produce it as cheap as anybody else, but I don’t know where consumers draw their lines.”

It may take a while for price increases on the farm to show up at the grocery store. Farmers are just planting their spring crops now, and it could take months for them to be harvested and sent off to distribution centers and eventually grocery stores.

But consumers may see higher prices sooner rather than later, because of higher transport costs with pricier diesel.

“If you’re feeling these costs now, it’s only going to continue to increase as the supply chain fills with higher-cost goods,” said Lillibridge.

“Corn is used in over 4,000 products,” he added. “It’s not just food — it’s industrial products, like your paper that you would put in your printer has cornstarch in it, plastics, just tons of things have industrial uses from corn.”

Economists say the longer the war stretches on, the larger the effects could be.

“Right now, our farmers can get the product — it’s just really expensive,” said Faith Parum, an economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, an advocacy group for farmers and ranchers. “We’re slowly starting to hear the longer this goes on, we’re also going to have issues with even the availability of the fertilizer.”

That could further strain farmers.

“We’re going on to year four of losses across the farm economy,” said Parum. “It’s going to become harder and harder for them to put a crop in the ground.”

Before the war, the Agriculture Department estimated that farm sector debt could reach a record $624.7 billion in 2026.

Farmers have received some financial assistance from the federal government over the years. In December, the Trump administration announced a new tranche of $12 billion in aid to farmers.

At a White House event for farmers in March, Trump said that he would push for more aid and urged Congress to pass a new farm bill.

Trump also pledged to ask Congress to permit year-round sales of E15, an unleaded fuel blended with 15% ethanol that the American Farm Bureau Federation says could save consumers money at the gas pump and create markets for American-grown crops.

Mueller was among the farmers last month at the White House, where he listened to Trump.

“I guess I would liken it to empty calories,” he said of the president’s remarks. “It was like a pep rally with very little being said.”

Mueller fears that the mounting pressures on farmers, exacerbated by the war, could lead some to hang up their hats for good.

“I really do see fewer farmers when it’s all done,” he said. “In the end, the consumer will still have fewer choices, probably have a little higher prices, and farmers will have less margin than they did before.”

WASHINGTON — House and Senate Republican leaders jointly announced a plan Wednesday that they said would end the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security that caused major airport delays.

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“In the coming days, Republicans in the Senate and House will be following through on the President’s directive by fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security on two parallel tracks: through the appropriations process and through the reconciliation process,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said in a statement.

The two leaders were vague about the exact plan, but it appears to closely resemble the Senate’s preferred path from Friday.

Johnson and Thune heavily implied that it would be for the Senate to, once again, pass a bill it approved unanimously last week, which it could try to do as early as Thursday.

It would fund all of DHS except ICE and Customs and Border Protection, which Democrats won’t agree to fund without reforms to immigration enforcement operations. Those two agencies already have separate funding.

House Republican leaders trashed that bill and rejected it Friday, but they now appear ready to back down and accept the Senate plan. They would have to vote to pass it through the House.

GOP leadership had no immediate comment on the timing for a vote. Both chambers are scheduled to be on recess until April 13.

Then Republicans would fund ICE and CBP in a separate party-line “budget reconciliation” bill that could bypass a filibuster and get approved without any Democratic votes. The timing for that is even less clear.

Johnson and Thune said the “two-track” plan would “fully reopen the Department, make sure all federal workers are paid, and specifically fund immigration enforcement and border security for the next three years so that those law-enforcement activities can continue uninhibited.”

A White House official told NBC News that the administration supports the Johnson-Thune plan.

Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump called on Republicans to pass the party-line bill “no later than June 1st.” He threw the earlier plans to reopen DHS into chaos last week when he declined to comment on the Senate bill, which led House Republicans to reject it.

DHS has been shut down for more than a month, with employees for the TSA, FEMA and other agencies going for weeks without pay. Trump signed an executive order last week to pay TSA employees, but the legality and length of that plan are murky. Thousands of civilian Coast Guard employees and other DHS workers are still not being paid.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed Republicans for having “derailed a bipartisan agreement” for days, “making American families pay the price for their dysfunction.”

“Throughout this fight, Senate Democrats never wavered. We were clear from the start: fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and Border Patrol enforcement,” he said Wednesday. “We were united, held the line, and refused to let Republican chaos win.”

On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said, “House Democrats are prepared to support the bill to end the Trump-Republican shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, make sure TSA agents are paid, stand up for FEMA and for the Coast Guard, for our cyber security professionals, and stop inconveniencing Americans.”

The grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, who has publicly criticized The Hershey Company for tinkering with the classic formula in its spinoff products, appears to have gotten some sweet revenge.

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The candy company has announced that it will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” in all its Reese’s and Hershey’s products by 2027.

“If this is true, the people who deserve the credit are the loyal fans who were alarmed by what Hershey was doing,” Brad Reese told NBC News on Wednesday. “But I am seeing a lot of red flags here. I think what Hershey is trying to do here is change with PR narrative.”

Reese, whose demands that Hershey stop skimping on chocolate went viral in February, said he trusts his taste buds more than he trusts the company that produces iconic candies that bear his family name.

“If something like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Heart still doesn’t taste like real milk chocolate next year, I’ll know they’re lying,” he said.

Hershey CEO Kirk Tanner made the announcement on Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg.

“We’re going to make some small investments to really align the portfolio to what the brand stands for,” Tanner said. “That consistency is important across the brand.”

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have been made with the same ingredients since 1928 — milk chocolate and peanut butter.

Starting next year, Tanner said candies inspired by the originals — like the “mini Reese’s cups and shapes,” as well as the Reese’s Fast Break candy bar — will also be made with real milk chocolate instead of a chocolate compound coating.

In addition, all the classic Hershey’s chocolate bars will also be made with “pure milk and dark chocolate,” he said. And Hershey is “enhancing” the Kit Kat candy bar “for a creamier taste and texture.”

In all, the company said the shift from chocolate compound coatings to the real thing will affect less than 3% of the Reese’s products and a tiny portion of Hershey’s products.

And Hershey is “on track” to remove all artificial colors from its products by the end of next year, the company said.

Tanner, in the Bloomberg interview, also insisted that the switch back to real chocolate was in the works long before Reese went public with his complaints.

“Right when I started with the company, we did a deep dive across our portfolio,” said Tanner, who joined the firm in August 2025.

Reese scoffed at that claim from Tanner.

“You know when this became an issue?” he asked. “Valentine’s Day. This has been going on since Valentine’s Day.”

Reese began taking Hershey to task after discovering that the company had replaced the milk chocolate with a chocolate-flavored coating on some of its Reese’s-inspired products, like the Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts.

Infuriated, Reese posted a link to a letter of complaint he wrote to Todd Scott, who does the corporate branding for Hershey, on his LinkedIn page.

Reese invoked the name of his grandfather H.B. Reese, who created the iconic peanut butter cup in 1928 and started a candy company that produced them until 1963. Hershey has been making them ever since.

“My grandfather,” Reese wrote, “built REESE’S on a simple, enduring architecture: Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter.”

But Hershey, he wrote, has replaced the original formula “with compound coatings and Peanut Butter with peanut-butter style cremes across multiple REESE’S products.”

That letter went viral.

Hershey insisted that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups were made the same way they had always been. But the company also conceded that, as it expanded its “Reese’s product line,” it had tinkered with the original recipe.

Right now, the Reese’s Mini Eggs that are a staple at Easter celebrations do not contain milk chocolate, according to their labels.

Neither do Reese’s Pieces, which were introduced in 1978 and became a sensation after they were featured in the 1982 movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

In response to an NBC News request for a full list of Reese’s and Hershey’s products that will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes,” the company released a statement that reiterated much of what Tanner said earlier.

“The core recipes for our Hershey’s chocolate bars and Reese’s peanut butter cups have not changed,” it said in part.

Surging oil prices continue to ripple through the global economy because of the war with Iran. Now, some analysts say the worst could still be ahead as the conflict drags on.

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The concern is that beyond immediate knock-on effects from rising gasoline prices, the war’s disruption could come in waves — ones that will play out over weeks and months and leave few parts of the global economy untouched.

“We haven’t seen the brunt of it yet,” said Samantha Gross, director of energy security and climate at the Brookings Institute. “I feel like markets are so far underestimating the effect of the war. It seems that they expect this war to go quickly, and they expect that we can go back to the world before when it’s over. And I don’t think either of those ideas is true.”

The warning signs are already here. The global oil price benchmark, Brent crude — which heavily influences U.S. gasoline prices — briefly topped $119 a barrel last week, the highest since the war began and a level last seen in July 2022 amid the pandemic-era inflation wave. As of Monday, Brent prices had settled at about $113 a barrel.

Colombian officials discovered a body Friday amid the search for a U.S. flight attendant who went missing in the country last weekend.

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Medellin Mayor Federico Gutiérrez announced the discovery in a post on X, saying that “a lifeless body has just been found between the municipality of Jericó and Puente Iglesias,” in the northeast region of the South American country.

The mayor said the body was likely that of Eric Fernando Gutierrez Molina, a 32-year-old American Airlines flight attendant from Texas who vanished while out with colleagues in Medellín, Colombia, during a layover.

“There is a very high probability that it is this person. The lifeless body is being transported to legal medicine in Medellín for identification and recognition,” Gutiérrez wrote on X. “We express our solidarity to his family and friends. I have just personally delivered the painful news to his father, who is in Medellín.”

Gutiérrez also said authorities suspect foul play, adding that officials “have very clear leads on those responsible” and calling for those individuals to be sought through extradition.

The mayor said he informed the U.S. ambassador to Colombia of the discovery. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Gutierrez Molina’s family.

In a news briefing, Medellín Security Secretary Manuel Villa said Gutierrez Molina was in Colombia on business and was out in the city of Itagüí with two co-workers that he identified as a man and a woman. Gutierrez Molina and the man then left the first establishment to go to a second location with others, also in Itagüí.

“And from there, once they left, there has been no further information on the whereabouts of Eric,” Villa said. “The woman arrived at the hotel where she was staying. However, she arrived somewhat disoriented.”

Villa said law enforcement have determined through their investigation that Gutierrez Molina and the woman encountered individuals “with a history of committing theft under the influence of scopolamine.”

The investigation remains under investigation and national police are still deployed throughout the area, Villa said.

Gutierrez Molina’s sister, Mayra Gutierrez, said in a phone call earlier this week that her brother had been out with another crew member over the weekend. She said the family last heard from him in the early hours of Sunday and confirmed that he worked for American Airlines.

American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement earlier this week, the airline said it is “actively engaged with local law enforcement officials in their investigation and doing all we can to support our team member’s family during this time,” but did not mention Gutierrez Molina by name.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans voted Friday evening to pass a short-term funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that has no viable path in the Senate and is likely to extend the shutdown stalemate on Capitol Hill.

The vote of 213-203 came after Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., rejected the Senate-passed bill, which would fund all of DHS except Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Funding for DHS lapsed in mid-February.

He called the Senate measure “a joke,” placing full blame for it on Democrats, even though Republicans control the Senate and the bill passed by unanimous consent early Friday morning.

“They have taken hostage the funding processes of government so that they can impose their radical agenda on the American people,” Johnson told reporters before the House vote.

His remarks came around the same time President Donald Trump signed an order directing the Department of Homeland Security to pay Transportation Security Administration employees who have missed paychecks during the DHS shutdown, leading to high TSA callout rates that have created long lines for passengers at U.S. airports. The dollar amount and authority for tapping the funds was not immediately clear, but a DHS spokesperson said paychecks should start arriving as early as Monday.

We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the partial government shutdown, whether you’re a TSA agent who can’t work right now or a federal employee who is feeling the effects at your agency. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.

The House-passed bill, which would fund DHS through May 22, is not expected to become law. The Senate left town Friday for a two-week recess, and Democratic senators have consistently vowed to block funding for ICE and CBP without constraints on immigration enforcement operations.

Asked if Trump has endorsed his plan, Johnson told reporters on Friday afternoon: “I spoke to the president a few moments ago; he understands exactly what we’re doing and why, and he supports it.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has no plans to bring back the Senate because there is no realistic path to passing the House bill, a GOP aide told NBC News.

The belief among Senate Republican leadership is that it does not make sense to pursue a path other than the bipartisan bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, minus ICE and CBP, that the Senate passed early Friday morning, according to a senior GOP aide.

The Senate over the past six weeks has attempted to pass numerous measures identical to the one passed by the House on Friday night, and all have failed in the face of Democratic opposition.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned that a House bill that funds ICE and CBP without guardrails would go nowhere in the Senate, where it would require 60 votes to advance. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

“We’ve been clear from day one: Democrats will fund critical homeland security functions — but we will not give a blank check to Trump’s lawless and deadly immigration militia without reforms,” Schumer said, adding that the House GOP’s short-term funding bill would be “dead on arrival in the Senate, and Republicans know it.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., sided with Schumer in favor of the Senate-passed bill.

“We have this bipartisan bill sent over by the Senate that House Democrats are prepared to support,” he told reporters Friday. “If that bill is brought to the floor today it will pass. The Trump-Republican DHS shutdown will be over. Unfortunately, MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives continue to inflict pain on the American people.”

Johnson put forward the short-term funding bill after a bloc of House conservatives expressed outrage over the Senate-passed measure and vowed to vote against it, complicating any move toward swift passage in the House.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., called the Senate bill “irresponsible” and added that voter identification provisions and parts of ICE funding must be included.

“Those two things will have to be in,” he said.

Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., said Democrats won’t support a bill to fund ICE without constraints after immigration enforcement agents killed two Americans in Minneapolis.

“I think we made it very clear, and the American public is demanding some sort of guardrails on an agency that has basically terrorized communities across this country, resulted in the death of two American citizens,” she said. “We have shone a light on just how rogue ICE was acting.”

Leaving the Capitol on Friday, Johnson told NBC News that he gave Thune a heads up before deciding to reject the Senate-passed measure and its omission of funding for ICE and CBP.

“We talked today, and I told him it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody we would not be able to do that,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to split apart two of the most important agencies in the government and leave them hanging like that. We just couldn’t do it.”