In a massive scandal, the Trump administration was caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics in August 2019 to hide the true extent of the economic ruin it had inflicted upon America. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released at that point showed that the administration padded the numbers with an extra 501,000 jobs that do not exist, and never did.
That, at least, is how Donald Trump would describe the scheduled revision of employment numbers released during his presidency were he being consistent with how he characterized a similar revision published on Wednesday. The reality is that there was no scandal under Trump and none now under President Joe Biden. Just a data-centered government agency doing its best to accurately represent the state of the economy.
You are probably aware that the government releases employment data every month. It uses several tools to do so, generating numbers that estimate both the number of people working and the percent of the workforce that’s unemployed. But those are both just estimates. Each month, the jobs report includes revisions of previous months’ numbers as it collects more data.
So, for example, the initial jobs report for May indicated that employment rose by 272,000 jobs. The June report, though, noted that this was an overestimate; the real increase was 218,000 jobs. But that, too, was off slightly. The most recent July report had the May increase at 216,000 jobs. More data comes in over time and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revises its estimates. And it does so transparently. You can see decades of its monthly revisions on its website.
What the BLS released on Wednesday was a different adjustment, an overall reconsideration of employment in March based on new data from state records. (The measure looks only at March employment each year.) This preliminary adjustment suggests that about 818,000 fewer people were working in March than had originally been reported — meaning that, instead of 158.1 million people, the total may have been closer to 157.3 million.
This is the predicate for Trump’s post on social media that we paraphrased at the beginning of this article.
“MASSIVE SCANDAL!” he wrote. “The Harris-Biden Administration” — see what he did there? — “has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America. 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.”
Allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) echoed similar claims.
But, again, it’s no more true now than it would have been for Trump in August 2019, when the preliminary change showed a downward adjustment of more than 500,000 jobs. As a percentage of employed Americans, the new adjustment is unusually large, a decrease of 0.5 percent. The largest previous percentage decline was in 2009, when the adjustment constituted 0.7 percent of employees.
The 2019 adjustment was 0.3 percent, until this month the biggest downshift since 2009. But, again, the data released on Wednesday are still preliminary, meaning that they are likely to change once the data are finalized. This is the schedule the BLS follows: a preliminary estimate in August and a final estimate the following February. The preliminary March 2023 data released a year ago suggested that employment was 306,000 workers lower than had been reported but the final February figure showed a more modest drop of 266,000.
In 2021 — admittedly a weird year in American employment — there was a difference of more than 500,000 between the preliminary and final figures. The initial August 2021 release showed that the March 2021 employment was 166,000 employees too high; the final adjustment released in February 2022 indicated that the initial data was 374,000 workers too low. It’s unlikely that the preliminary estimated drop of 818,000 workers will suddenly become an increase, but it may not end up being 818,000, either.
What’s important to keep in mind here is that the adjustment also doesn’t do much to address the broader point Trump wants to make. He hopes to insinuate that there’s some conspiracy to misrepresent the numbers, yes, but that’s obviously false given the explanation above. (It also doesn’t make any sense politically: If the administration were inventing data to boost Harris, why wouldn’t it invent a different adjustment or not release it?) But Trump also wants to suggest that job growth under Biden has been weaker than Democrats like to argue. (This is similarly why he likes to claim that more than 100 percent of new employment (?) is going to immigrants, which it isn’t.)
BLS data indicate that 15.8 million more people are working now than were working in January 2021. From January 2017 to January 2021, the period during which Trump was president, 2.7 million fewer Americans were working. That was largely because of the coronavirus pandemic, but even comparing the first three years of each president’s administrations, employment increased more than twice as much under Biden.
Even if you take 800,000 jobs away from Biden’s total, he’s still at 15 million more workers — more than Trump’s net loss and more than the 6.4 million more people working in January 2020 than were working in January 2017.
You can see the appeal for Trump in claiming that an insidious conspiracy led to Biden’s jobs numbers being overstated. But there’s no such conspiracy, just government bureaucracy slowly doing its thing.
And there’s no real comparison on job addition, either.
