Even Now, Barack Obama Is Costing People Their Jobs

Even years after leaving office, Barack Obama continues his long track record as a jobs killer.

The latest victim? A subcontractor caught in the endless drama and cost overruns surrounding his hideous Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. You know, the one that requires ID to get into for special events. (Literally, Jim Crow 2.0!)

Anyway, it looks like the company in question had to shut down operations and lay off over two dozen employees. All while in the midst of a battle over a $4 million payment on which they claim they were stiffed.

"Laying off close to 30 people is something that no owner in our industry wants to do," Mike Owen, owner of Adamson Plumbing Contractors, told Fox News Digital. "It’s a hard thing to do, especially when you know you can finish them and the company can still make money. But we were put in a pretty bad corner."

Critics have long called the Obama Center a boondoggle—an eyesore of a monument to one man’s ego that has disrupted neighborhoods, driven up costs, and delivered far less than promised to the very communities Barack claims to champion.

Now it’s literally costing local people their paychecks.

STIFFED: An Obama Presidential Center plumbing subcontractor has now suspended operations and laid off 25 workers amid an almost $4 million payment dispute.

Owner Mike Owen said the breaking point came when a recent payment failed to arrive, forcing his company to abandon half a… pic.twitter.com/5HIgEAh9b0
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) July 23, 2026

Embedded tweet continues:
... dozen other jobs and file a $1.72 million lien against the center.
“It was just the final death blow to the company,” Owen told Fox News Digital.
Story by Michael Dorgan/@M_Dorgan

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Owen claims the company had been hanging on through previous payment struggles, but the breaking point came when a pair of plumbers were asked to perform last-minute "housekeeping" work before the center opened. They agreed, on the condition that at least $100,000 of the disputed amount was paid.

He claims the payment did not arrive on time.

"We negotiated it in good faith," he told the network. "Against my better judgment, I agreed [to do the work]."

"Not getting that large sum of money just kind of pulled the brakes on the train. It was just the final death blow to the company."

It also forced the firm to abandon half a dozen other construction jobs and file a $1.72 million lien against the center.

Thanks, Obama!

RedState's Becky Noble previously reported that "several contractors and subcontractors are engaged in payment disputes" with the Obama Center, as some claimed "losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions."

Those disputes, some contend, could lead to "financial ruin."

A good number of them involved black-owned subcontractors.

Meanwhile Obama's Presidential Center,

"So many of our black contractors are complaining they have not got their money. A lot of the black community and newspapers do not know."
pic.twitter.com/ZzagSVvzAW
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) June 15, 2026

No surprise, really.

Obama was the architect of the painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession and the subsequent lagging growth compared to prior administrations.

Then there was the Obamacare jobs killer. In which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the law would reduce the labor supply by the equivalent of about 2 million full-time jobs over time through incentives that encouraged fewer hours or workforce exit.

Add in the 2009 stimulus, which inflated the headline job counts by funding temporary government and public-sector positions. So desperate was Obama to portray himself as a jobs creator that, when tracking the stimulus, his administration stopped counting actual jobs and started counting "lives touched."

That term, by the way, referred to anybody on a job who "directly charged 1 or more hours of work time to a … contract" funded by the stimulus. No, I'm not kidding.

Here we are 16 years later, and Obama is still touching lives. Just not in a positive manner.

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