As we eagerly await the March employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’m going to take a few minutes to set the context from the last month and reiterate why it’s so important to let the economy get to full employment. Although President Trump claimed to have inherited a “mess” of an economy, the fact is that the economy has been slowly but steadily headed ever-closer to full employment for years. Simultaneously, the president has claimed he will enact policies that will see us add 25 million new jobs over the next 10 years. This pace of job growth over a decade is pretty much impossible to envision. But we could in theory see 2-3 years of significantly faster job growth than what has characterized the recent past. Unfortunately, no sign of this theoretical possibility has shown up in the data yet.

As shown in the figure below, payroll employment growth in February came in at 235,000. This is very much in line with what we saw in January (238,000) or in February of 2016 (237,000). While sustained growth at this level is welcome, it is hardly a break with very recent past trends and cannot be rightly attributed to any new policy. EPI’s new autopilot economy tracker examines key labor market indicators to see where our performance going forward either diverges or doesn’t diverge from the trends inherited from recent years. We track payroll employment growth along with the unemployment rate, prime-age employment-to-population ratio, and nominal wage growth.

Next, I’ll turn to the unemployment rate, which was 4.7 percent in February and has fallen steadily over the last eight years from a high of 10.0 percent. Over this past year, the economy has continued to add jobs faster than working-age population growth, meaning that workers idled by the Great Recession and slow recovery are still being re-absorbed into the labor force. The average unemployment rate over the three months prior to President’s Trump first jobs report was 4.7 percent, a fall of 0.3 percentage points from the average rate from the same three months the previous year (5.0 percent). At this speed of improvement, the unemployment rate would hit 4.0 percent some time in 2019. This is not necessarily an unrealistic aspiration. The U.S. economy sat at roughly 4.0 percent for two solid years in 1999 and 2000, and policymakers should be aiming for continued downward pressure on unemployment from today.

Failure to deliver even lower unemployment in the coming years should be seen as a policy mistake—either by the Federal Reserve or by fiscal policymakers . We should only say our work is done when the labor market is tight enough to deliver sustained healthy wage growth, which likely only happen when wages are rising for all workers—regardless of gender, race, or educational attainment. We saw that happen in the late 1990s and early 2000, and it can happen again. So, while the economy is the strongest it’s been in years, there are still a lot of workers sitting on the sidelines and underutilized. For communities across the country to feel the full extent of the recovery, the Federal Reserve needs to keep their foot off the brakes and let the economy reach full employment before raising interest rates again.

The importance of an aggressive pursuit of full employment becomes even more apparent when we look under the hood of the overall unemployment rate. While the topline indicators provide important measures of the overall economy, workers of color, as well as young workers and less credentialed workers, suffer from higher than average unemployment rates in both good times and bad. For example, it was only in July 2015 that the black unemployment rate finally ducked below where the white unemployment rate was at its peak in the aftermath of the Great Recession. I hope the jobs report is as solid as we’ve seen in recent years, but I also hope the Federal Reserve won’t take that as a sign that we have reached full employment, because, by all measures, we are not there yet.