Trump says America has ‘too many’ national holidays and they’re hurting the economy. Is he right?

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for fewer federal holidays, saying the days off cost America billions of dollars in losses.

President Donald Trump on Thursday called for fewer federal holidays, saying the days off cost America billions of dollars in losses. “Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Juneteenth, a newly designated federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged during a Thursday briefing with reporters that it was a federal holiday and thanked reporters for showing up, but declined to answer whether Trump was doing anything to mark it. “The workers don’t want it either!” Trump said of federal holidays in his post. “Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Is there any truth to his comments? Yes and no. Most research around the economic impact of federal holidays deals with how worker productivity is impacted. Worker productivity measures how much workers are able to achieve over a given period of time. A day off work, therefore, would put worker productivity at zero. But research suggests that it’s not just, say, July 4 itself that causes productivity to slump. It’s the days before and after, since workers tend to schedule time off around them, leaving employees who opted not to take those days off with heavier workloads, thus reducing their productivity.