Congress and the Federal Reserve can't move fast enough to keep the economy from falling into a recession, new data show.

Consumer spending barely grew in December, rising just 0.2 percent, the slowest gain in six months, the Commerce Department reported. The data, following soft sales reports from many retailers, shows that Americans are cutting back on their spending, the main driver of economic growth.

A separate report from the Labor Department showed that the number of Americans who filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 69,000, to 375,000 last week—the biggest gain since September 2005, when claims rose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The jobless claims data are often volatile, but today's number may unsettle investors, as it comes a day before the most closely watched economic report of them all, the employment figure for January.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department estimated that the economy grew at an annual pace of 0.6 percent in the last three months of 2007, the slowest growth in five years, when the economy was just emerging from a recession.

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