The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.5% annual pace from January through March as President Donald Trump’s trade wars disrupted business, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in an unexpected deterioration of earlier estimates.
First-quarter growth was weighed down by a surge of imports as U.S. companies, and households, rushed to buy foreign goods before Trump could impose tariffs on them. The Commerce Department previously estimated that the economy fell 0.2% in the first quarter. Economists had forecast no change in the department’s third and final estimate.
The January-March drop in gross domestic product—the nation’s output of goods and services—reversed a 2.4% increase in the last three months of 2024 and marked the first time in three years that the economy contracted. Imports expanded 37.9%, fastest since 2020, and pushed GDP down by nearly 4.7 percentage points.
Consumer spending also slowed sharply, expanding just 0.5%, down from a robust 4% in fourth-quarter 2024 and a sharp downgrade from the Commerce Department’s previous estimate.
A category within the GDP data that measures the economy’s underlying strength rose at a 1.9% annual rate from January through March. It’s a decent number, but down from 2.9% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and from the Commerce Department’s previous estimate of 2.5% January-March growth.
