Trump fired the BLS chief after July’s weak report and installed E.J. Antoni.
The Labor Department just admitted the U.S. economy didn’t create as many jobs as it told everyone it did. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)’s report released Tuesday shows the government overstated employment gains by 911,000 over a one-year period leading up to March.
That’s the biggest revision since 2002, and it just gave Donald Trump a major “told you so” moment.
Wall Street had been bracing for a big revision, and some companies expected as much as a million, but most estimates were around 600,000.
Most of the overestimated jobs were logged before he returned to the White House. So, when he started pushing tariffs and the data still looked weak, the administration blamed the BLS for hiding how bad things really were.
After July’s jobs report turned out to be garbage, with major downward corrections and soft numbers, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Her replacement? E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist from the Heritage Foundation.
But even with the leadership change, the August jobs report came in even worse than July. Then the June total got nuked too, revised to a loss of 13,000 jobs, marking the first monthly decline since December 2020.
BLS says this isn’t a political issue. They claim the corrections are based on new data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and also include updated business tax filings.
Unlike the monthly numbers, which are built on surveys and subject to small tweaks, these annual revisions are deep cuts, basically a full reset of the data using more solid evidence.
This year’s slash was 50% larger than the last and points to a shaky jobs situation through 2024 and early 2025.
The new numbers kill the idea of a strong labor market. Over the revised period, average monthly job growth is now 76,000 less than what the government had previously said. That makes a massive difference when you’re trying to gauge the real health of the economy.
And the latest numbers from June, July, and August don’t help either, with just 29,000 jobs added per month, the U.S. isn’t even hitting breakeven to keep unemployment stable.
The biggest drops came in leisure and hospitality (-176,000), professional and business services (-158,000), and retail trade (-126,200). Most other sectors also went down. Transportation, warehousing, and utilities were the rare ones that showed small gains.
The private sector got hit the hardest, while government jobs were adjusted down by only 31,000.
Despite the huge revisions, stocks mostly shrugged. But Treasury yields, which had dropped earlier in the day, reversed and went up. Traders probably saw the revisions as another sign the Fed may pivot back to rate cuts.
The BLS says Tuesday’s numbers aren’t final. This is just the preliminary benchmark revision. A more complete version will come in February 2026, and that one could still shift, up or down. But the direction so far is clear: the jobs picture has been worse than anyone thought for a long time.
Last year’s revision, which covered the 12 months before March 2024, originally showed a drop of 818,000 jobs, which was revised again in February to a still-painful 598,000 fewer jobs. That was the worst since the 2009 financial crisis, but this new one just beat it.
Additionally, the BLS data also shows that the latest cut is equal to 0.6% of the U.S. labor force, which has about 171 million people. That might not sound huge at first, but in a country this big, that’s hundreds of thousands of paychecks that didn’t exist. It also matters politically, because it boosts Trump’s argument that the data under Biden was flawed and misleading.
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