Dominic Pino of National Review Online doubts that a recent revision of federal jobs data has anything to do with politics.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its annual revision of the jobs numbers today, showing that it had overestimated job growth between March 2023 and March 2024 by 818,000 jobs. These revisions happen every year, but this was a bigger miss than normal.
Given the direction of the miss, some are attributing it to politics. Donald Trump called it a “massive scandal” and posted on Truth Social that “the Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America.”
This seems unlikely to be the case, for the following reasons:
1. The premise of Trump’s complaint doesn’t make sense. Nobody “caught” the BLS. The BLS is revising its own data, on the same schedule it does every year.
2. If the BLS were trying to cover up worse jobs numbers for Democrats, it would not make sense to issue the revision now, as regularly scheduled, before voting begins. A cover-up would look something like delaying the revision until December.
3. The BLS missed in the other direction earlier in the Biden administration. In August 2022, the BLS revised job growth upward by 462,000 jobs, meaning it had undercounted job growth under Biden from March 2021 to March 2022. That was in the lead-up to the midterm elections, so at that time Democrats could have complained that the BLS was biased against them.
4. In August 2019, when Trump was president, this same regularly scheduled annual revision showed that the BLS had overcounted job growth by 501,000 jobs. Was the BLS manipulating data then to make Trump look better? Doubtful.
5. If the BLS were biased in favor of Democrats, it probably wouldn’t publish data showing that the union-membership rate is at a record low despite Biden’s efforts to run the most pro-union administration in American history and the media’s efforts to spin a “union resurgence.”
