900K jobs go poof: Why the Bureau of Labor Statistics can’t count | Opinion
Donald Trump is right that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a mess, as proven by Monday’s April 2024 to March 2025 jobs revisions going down by 911,000. That’s the biggest revision this century and a sure sign that something is wrong at the agency. But Trump has the diagnosis wrong. The BLS is not befuddled by anti-Trump partisanship.
Democrats are right that the president’s decision to freeze the BLS budget has paralyzed the agency just as we enter a potential downturn and the data it produces is critical to policymakers. But Democrats have the wrong perpetrator. The BLS was not wrecked by Trump.
Meanwhile, you can sure see why Trump was concerned the BLS was out to get him by producing inflated numbers to bolster Joe Biden’s presidency. Two years in a row the BLS business jobs survey did overstate Biden job creation by a combined seven figures before eventual revisions.
But a complete accounting of BLS revisions of its initial estimates includes many embarrassing moments for the Democrats, including one that might have helped Trump seal his 2024 electoral victory.
As Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Sean Higgins put it: “In a report just days before the fall election, BLS found that a mere 12,000 jobs were created in October and revised downward the gains for September and August by a combined 112,000. It was a gut punch to the faltering campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.” That’s not what a partisan agency would do.
That’s hardly the only example of a gut punch to the Democrats. Just a few weeks after the Democrats’ presidential convention made a major selling point of Biden’s job creation record, the BLS announced revisions that deflated the Biden balloon by about 600,000 jobs. That’s not what a deep State agency in the tank for Democrats would do.
So what about Democrats’ contention that Trump’s firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and decision to install E.J. Antoni from the conservative Heritage Foundation is going to wreck the BLS by injecting politics into the staid nonpartisan bureau?
The truth is that the agency was wrecked before Trump ever set foot in the White House. During Biden’s presidency the BLS budget grew nominally but did so during an inflationary period that saw it lose about one-sixth of its purchasing power. Its 2024 budget of $630 million should have been $723 million just to have the same purchasing power as when Biden came into office.
‘Hampered by underfunding’
Previous presidents of both parties had not funded the agency lavishly either. Funding was flat under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Trump let the agency budget shrink slightly in his first term in inflation adjusted dollars, though he did give it the only big annual budget boost since the first year of the Obama administration.
As a result, centrist and left-leaning data nerds had been raising the alarm for years that the agency was in trouble. The first report I found raising the issue is from 2015 when Obama was president.
Last year Biden’s own secretary of labor appointed a group to look into botched statistics releases and other issues at the agency that found they were in part caused by the bureau’s technology and software, which are both “hampered by underfunding.” That echoed a report by the American Statistical Association earlier in 2024.
Last fall, the Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress worried about stagnant funding at the agency reducing its accuracy and argued for $180 million boost to its budget. In February 2025, the National Retail Federation, the National Association for Business Economics and dozens of other groups wrote to Congress: “Unless the current trends — i.e., declines in purchasing power and staff — are reversed, we believe these agencies will have to make further cuts … (a) critical issue threatening our nation’s economic statistical infrastructure.”
To be clear, nothing Trump is proposing at BLS is a productive step forward for BLS. The agency is crucial in our everyday lives. It creates the federal statistics that undergird Federal Reserve policies and shape what you pay for loans and credit cards. It drives business investment decisions that decide whether new jobs are created and daily vagaries of the stock markets that determine how your 401(k) is doing. But to be fair to Trump, the agency was a mess before he ever fired up the MAGA bulldozers to destroy what’s left.
David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star.
