U.S. employers are adding far fewer jobs than initially tallied, in the latest sign that the labor market may be weaker than expected, according to a preliminary report from the Labor Department on Tuesday.
The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows hiring for the 12 months ending in March was overstated by an estimated 911,000 jobs. It was the largest such preliminary revision on record, going back to 2000.
The revision comes at a time when President Trump is politicizing the BLS and casting doubt on its data, as part of his wider efforts to exert more control over all aspects of the U.S. government.
Last month, he fired the previous BLS head after a weaker-than-expected jobs report, claiming without evidence that the agency was manipulating the numbers to make the economy under his term look bad.
Tuesday’s revision does more to make the economy under President Biden look bad: It tracks hiring data through the 12 months ending in March, after Trump had only been back in office for weeks.
Yet the White House on Tuesday was quick to claim vindication from what is normally a routine annual data update.
“The BLS is broken. This is exactly why we need new leadership to restore trust and confidence in the BLS’s data,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an emailed statement.
The BLS has traditionally built trust and confidence by regularly checking and publicly revising its data. Tuesday’s revision is part of a routine, annual exercise in which the government checks its monthly jobs numbers — which come from a sampling of employers — against much more complete data from state tax records. (Tuesday’s estimate is preliminary. A final tally will be released early next year.)
But now Trump’s attacks against the BLS are raising concerns that the government’s number crunchers will be politically motivated, which is fueling worries about the integrity of the country’s economic data.
On Tuesday, top members of Trump’s administration echoed his attacks on the BLS. “It’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become. A change was necessary [to] restore confidence,” Vice President J.D. Vance posted on X.
Trump last month nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to lead the BLS. Antoni previously worked at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, and many commentators have raised concerns about whether he has the experience to run the agency or whether he will protect it from political influences. Antoni would need to be confirmed by the Senate.
Tuesday’s revision was somewhat expected, but still on the high end of what both economists and White House officials predicted.
In a research note published Sunday, economists at Goldman Sachs predicted that the revision would be between 550,000 and 950,000 jobs. And in a Sunday interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put his estimate at up to 800,000 jobs.
The revision is likely to further compound concerns about the labor market. Last week, the Labor Department reported lackluster job growth during the summer months, with employers adding just 22,000 jobs in August and a net loss of jobs in June for the first time since the pandemic winter of 2020.
The Federal Reserve has been closely monitoring signs of weakness in the labor market, ahead of a key decision on interest rates next week. The central bank is widely expected to cut its benchmark borrowing rate by a quarter percentage point in an effort to prevent widespread job losses.
But Tuesday’s BLS revision also gave the White House another opportunity to criticize the Fed and its chair, Jerome Powell. Trump has been openly pressuring both to lower rates, as he seeks to bring the independent central bank under his control.
