 THE GRIM NEWS ABOUT JOBS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs.
The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden handed off a strong economy to President Donald Trump, who then weakened it. Republicans maintained that Biden handed off a weak economy to Trump, who then strengthened it. Now, it appears that from a jobs standpoint, the economy has been weaker than thought the whole time.
It is common for early job numbers to be revised; it happens all the time, but this latest revision is entirely uncommon, the largest on record. And it is evidence of a problem that is becoming more and more serious.
Last year, there was another story like this one, in which we learned that from April 2023 to March 2024, the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had originally said, wiping out most of the economy’s gains. The number was finalized at about 600,000 jobs, fewer than originally estimated, but the gap between early reports and reality was huge.
When that happened last year, candidate Donald Trump denounced the jobs numbers as fake. “New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Fast forward to last month, August 1, 2025. BLS reported that the economy added just 73,000 jobs in July. But more importantly, BLS made huge downward revisions in the job numbers from May to June this year. The May numbers were revised from 144,000 to 19,000 jobs; the June numbers were revised from 147,000 to 14,000 jobs.
Trump went off again. “In my opinion, today’s jobs numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump posted. The president then fired Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner.
The great and the good rose to denounce Trump. That’s what they do. But now, with the latest huge revisions on top of the previous huge revisions, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is something terribly wrong with how the BLS counts the number of jobs created each month. That is not to say that Erika McEntarfer was trying to win the election for Kamala Harris, or that she was acting out of bald political bias. It is just to say that something is wrong.
Experts point to problems with the BLS surveys of businesses that bring in the jobs data. On CNN Tuesday afternoon, Bill Beach, who was commissioner of BLS from 2019 to 2023, said, “We need to do some big things to reform the statistics,” suggesting BLS needs to go “deep inside and say, can we make the surveys better?”
This is important because many people in many corners of the economy rely on the BLS data. Businesspeople base business decisions on it. Government officials base governmental decisions on it. Politicians base political decisions on it.
So it needs to be fixed, and fast. On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance posted, “It’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become. A change was necessary to restore confidence.” Can anyone disagree with that? |
