President Donald Trump can consider himself fully vindicated. He was right to assert that the Bureau of Labor Statistics requires new leadership to resolve its persistently imprecise employment data. Trump was right again in concluding that the Federal Reserve has been too late in responding to the deterioration of the job market. By all available measures, inflation is holding lower than economists expected it would after Trump’s sweeping tariff regime went into full effect. Now, the BLS has conceded that the strength of the labor market in the final year of former President Joe Biden‘s presidency was largely a mirage, one that allowed the Fed to miss the mark.
In the 12 months ending in March of this year, the BLS reported that the economy added 911,000 fewer jobs than it previously stated, slashing the previously reported number of jobs added by more than half. As a percentage, the 52% decrease in reported job growth was the second-highest in 20 years, coming only after the black swan year of 2020. In absolute terms, it was the single largest revision of the 21st century.
Trump’s intentions in browbeating Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and trying to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook may be purely mercenary, but on the merits, he is correct: The economy has been long cratering away from full employment, and thanks to the erroneous numbers put up by the BLS, the central bank has failed to adapt as a result.
Consider that in the initial reads of the 24 months ending in March of 2025, the BLS reported nearly 5 million new jobs created in roughly the final two years of the Biden administration. The preliminary revisions for both of those years combined brought the new jobs created to just shy of 3 million. In other words, nearly 2 million jobs that were ostensibly created under the second half of Biden’s presidency never actually existed.
This crisis has continued after Trump fired Erika McEntarfer as BLS commissioner. The first monthly jobs report released since McEntarfer’s ousting, the June jobs report, which initially reported a gain of 147,000 jobs, has now been revised downward to just 14,000 jobs in the July revision and now an absolute decrease of 13,000 jobs in the August revision. Whether the preliminary August reading of an anemic 22,000 jobs added to the economy holds true remains to be seen.
By the same token, inflation seems to be moderating. The producer price index actually fell in August. Over the past 12 months ending in August, the PPI rose by 2.6%, below the expectation of 3.3%. The core PPI, which excludes the volatile categories of food and energy, rose by 2.8%, below the expectation of 3.5%. Considering that wholesale inflation is widely understood as a leading indicator for the burden that will be borne by the consumer in the future, Trump’s tariffs may be fully priced into the market by now.
All of this means that, as Powell conceded at the annual Jackson Hole summit, the Fed’s dual mandate of ensuring price stability and maximizing employment may be skewing toward prioritizing jobs for the first time in half a decade. The issue is that the Fed has relied on shoddy data.
CHARLIE KIRK WAS MURDERED FOR WINNING THE WAR OF PUBLIC PERSUASION
Trump critics have tried to use the most recent jobs revisions to bemoan McEntarfer’s firing. In fact, the revisions prove that Trump is correct. His BLS nominee, E.J. Antoni, has not been allowed to set foot in the building.
The Fed has indeed been too late in beginning to relax monetary policy, and the bank would have known it much earlier with better BLS leadership. Every moment the Senate waits to confirm Antoni to overhaul the systemic failures of the BLS is one that risks the stability of global finance and American wealth.
