U.S. employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than first reported, new BLS data shows

The U.S. labor market was much weaker during much of 2024 and early 2025 than data initially showed, a new government report indicated Tuesday - adding more uncertainty into the economy and fueling a raging debate over the figures that analysts use to understand it.

In the largest preliminary revision to jobs data on record, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said employers had created 911,000 fewer positions from April 2024 to March 2025 than previously reported. That’s less than half as many as the agency had initially indicated. The data will be revised again and finalized early next year.

The revision adds more evidence that the economy was already slowing even before President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs and immigration policies squeezed costs for many businesses.

And it landed just a month after Trump fired the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, over weak jobs data, accusing her without evidence of overseeing government figures that were “rigged” for political purposes, including to help Democrats in the presidential election that Trump won.

The White House said the new report justified Trump’s move and showed the economy was suffering under President Joe Biden.

“Today, the BLS released the largest downward revision on record proving that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a separate statement that American people had “even more reason to doubt the integrity of [BLS] data” and condemned the agency’s leaders, who she said had “failed to improve their practices during the Biden administration.”

Forecasters said they had expected a large revision this year due in part to slowing business growth, shifting immigration levels, declining response rates to government surveys and an apparent downward shift in the broader economy.

“This data, I think, indicates that the labor market has been weaker, but this doesn’t materially change my view of how the labor is doing or how the economy is performing,” said economist Michael Strain of the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. “What we’re seeing is a gradual orderly slowdown in the labor market, and that’s consistent with what we’re seeing with overall economic activity. We should conclude from the revisions that things were a little weaker than we had thought.”

The three major stock indexes sank Tuesday morning on news of the massive downward revisions, which added to mounting evidence that the labor market has cooled substantially over the past couple of years. But they rallied by midday to pick up slightly as investors look ahead to potential rate cuts at next week’s Federal Reserve meeting.

The new annual revisions provide a more accurate snapshot of the labor market before new economic forces began to take hold - including higher tariffs and stronger immigration enforcement from the Trump administration. Those forces have lately weighed on the labor market, which could be heading for a downturn. Most of the new data reflects the labor market under Biden. The report does not change estimates of job gains since March.

The figures removed about 0.6 percent of all U.S. employment, the largest percentage fix since 2009. The economy has grown by millions of jobs in recent years, so large revisions are in part a reflection of that rapid expansion, especially after the pandemic.

The revisions are part of a routine annual process in which monthly jobs figures based on surveys of businesses are adjusted based on more comprehensive statistics from state unemployment office records.

Separate monthly jobs data published last week revealed a rising unemployment rate and weaker-than-expected job creation of just 22,000 new positions in August. Even more concerning: The data showed the labor market shed jobs in June, the first such losses since the coronavirus pandemic.

The Trump administration shrugged off the slowdown as temporary, saying it expects a resurgence of new jobs and advanced manufacturing as a result of the president’s trade and immigration policies.

Some economists argue that the labor market is still solid. The unemployment rate remains relatively low, at 4.3 percent, as do layoffs. Lower levels of immigration could mean that fewer new jobs are needed, compared with recent years, to keep the unemployment rate stable. But Federal Reserve officials have already signaled that they are prepared to cut interest rates when the board of governors meets next week, as a reaction to the weakening jobs market.

Last year, the preliminary revisions to jobs data drew an uproar, when government reported that the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March 2024 - in the biggest fix to federal jobs data in 15 years. Those revisions were later updated again to show 598,000 fewer jobs over the period ending in March 2024. At the height of presidential campaign cycle, Trump jumped on the revisions, to accuse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Biden of “fraudulently manipulating job statistics” for political purposes.

Jobs numbers are prone to revisions when calibrated with less timely but more exact data from state unemployment offices because initial monthly data is based on surveys of about 121,000 businesses and other employers. That’s only a fraction of the millions of U.S. employers. Large changes to the monthly jobs numbers can happen when the economy is rapidly growing or shrinking, such as during the pandemic. During those periods, federal officials often have a harder time estimating the number of businesses that are opening or shutting down. Plus, business response rates to government surveys have consistently fallen over the past decade.

Strain, the American Enterprise Institute economist, said that he believes the massive revisions will “unfortunately contribute to the narrative that there’s something fishy going on at BLS. It’s possible that we’ll see an even more aggressive response from the president.”

“I think there is not a shred of evidence to believe that there’s any political bias in the data and there’s not a shred of evidence to believe the data are being manipulated in any way for any reason,” Strain said. “In addition, I think there’s lots of scope to improve the data, and that’s something that I think would require money.”

Since firing McEntarfer in early August, Trump has nominated BLS critic and Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni to lead the agency. Antoni is facing scrutiny from policymakers and economists for his pro-MAGA partisanship, relative lack of experience and what critics have called a misunderstanding of economic data, which could threaten his confirmation hearing in the coming weeks. Antoni has said he is interested in improving the accuracy of BLS data, and the White House has said that Trump tapped Antoni to solve these problems.

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https://washingtonpost.com/documents/3b6392e7-d6e3-4501-bb7f-307509796c24.pdf