Did Donald Trump’s economic policies start a job-creation stall? According to annual revisions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not exactly. The job stall began long before Trump took office again, as the BLS ‘adjusted’ nearly a million previously reported jobs off the books.
It’s the second year in a row for massive downward revisions, Washington Post econ reporter Heather Long points out. The new numbers show that the US economy added around 75K a month, well below the maintenance level in relation to population growth, for a full year before Trump started imposing new tariffs on trade:
JUST IN: -911,000 fewer jobs were created between April ’24 and March ’25, the BLS says. Wow, that’s a big revision. That means the labor market was weak even before the tariffs kicked in. The job market was mostly frozen in 2024, too.
Average job gains before revision =147,000… pic.twitter.com/7BecpeWt0d
— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) September 9, 2025
Average job gains before revision =147,000 per month
**Average job gains AFTER revision = 71,000/month**
[Note: This annual revision process is normal. The BLS does it every year. Last August, the BLS reported -818,000 fewer jobs. Yes, these are large (negative) revisions. Why? It’s mainly due to problems accounting for new/closed businesses since the pandemic.]
Long is correct that the BLS does an annual cleanup in August of every year. However, the combined two-year cleanup has now removed 1.7 million jobs previously reported by BLS, an average of 71,000 phantom jobs a month. Nor does the pandemic excuse fit the problem, either. By 2021, all of the restrictions on commerce had been lifted. The effect of the pandemic on statistical analyses for business openings and closings should have ended at that time, or no longer than 2022’s data.
Either this is incompetence, or it’s corruption. There are no other explanations for consistent misses of this magnitude for two full years with no effective corrections.
Needless to say, this bolsters claims made by the Trump administration of malfeasance at BLS. After firing the head of the bureau, the White House began an investigation into BLS operations. They are focusing particularly on revisions, and the WSJ reports that Trump’s team will publish a report shortly on issues they have already discovered:
Five weeks after President Trump fired the chief of the agency that gathers the country’s labor and price data, his advisers are preparing a report laying out alleged shortcomings of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs data, according to people familiar with the matter.
The report takes a critical look at the BLS and lays out a historical overview of the agency’s jobs-data revisions, they said.
The administration is considering publishing the study, written by the Council of Economic Advisers, in the coming weeks, according to these people.
It comes amid an unprecedented level of criticism by a presidential administration at what is normally seen as the routine, nonpartisan job of compiling crucial U.S. economic data.
Well, that’s the issue, no? Is it nonpartisan? It is quite curious that the BLS statistics overstated job growth by nearly two million for two consecutive years, during a period when the Biden White House desperately needed to demonstrate economic growth amid an inflationary wave. The BLS statistics overstated job growth by about 100% over that two-year period, which is far above any expected statistical noise or expected variance in reliable polling.
A miss like that for a single month, or perhaps a couple a year, could be explained by statistical noise or choppy data availability. Missing consistently for 24 polling cycles in a row, not to mention the big backward and downward revisions this summer? Only incompetence or corruption could reasonably explain it. If 100% misses are “routine,” as the WSJ suggests, then the BLS data is worthless regardless of the reason for it.
We can perhaps withhold judgment on the cause. The value of the data, however, is now pretty obviously zero.
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