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Days after a positively atrocious employment report, more bad news befell the American economy via the release of the latest “benchmark revisions” to previously published annual employment data.
According to the new numbers – published on Tuesday (September 9, 2025) by the perpetually goal-seeking U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) – a record 911,000 jobs were “disappeared” between the months of April 2024 and March 2025. That total – which represents 0.6% of the entire U.S. workforce – was even worse than last summer’s announcement of 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 to March 2024.
It also came on top of previous downward revisions of 577,000 for the period.
While the vast majority of “disappeared” jobs on the latest report (.pdf) came under the administration of former president Joe Biden, the revision period did include the first two months of the second term of president Donald Trump. And, as we noted last week, Trump’s numbers haven’t looked so hot since then…
Over the last 20 years, benchmark revisions have pushed job totals lower thirteen times – while seven years have seen upward revisions. The best year over the past two decades was 2006, in which the economy created 810,000 more jobs than originally reported.
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RELATED | JOBS COLLAPSE ACCELERATES
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Trump’s administration pounced on the latest release, pointing the finger of blame squarely at Biden.
“It’s official: 2024 job gains were exaggerated by nearly 1 million workers, and this is on top of an already reported 577,000 in downward revisions,” U.S. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent wrote on X. “This brings the Biden jobs overstatement to a staggering 1.5 million.”
Bessent also advanced Trump’s narrative that the soft economy is due to the failure of embattled Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates – something the president has been demanding the secretive central bank do since he took office.
“President Trump inherited a far worse economy than reported, and he’s right to say the Fed is choking off growth with high rates,” Bessent said.
Vice president JD Vance also joined the pile-on, referring to BLS data as “useless” and claiming the Trump administration’s decision to install new leadership would “restore confidence” in the numbers. Vance is certainly correct regarding the data, but many believe Trump is currently pushing the BLS to deflate jobs totals in the hopes of forcing the Fed to cut rates.
FITSNews has editorialized against manipulating jobs data… for any reason.
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“It’s wrong to lie to people – and it’s wrong to play politics with economic data,” I noted in a previous employment report. “The Fed should raise or cut rates based on valid macroeconomic indicators – not political considerations. Similarly, Trump’s administration should not manipulate jobs data because it wants to force the Fed’s hands – or for any other reason.”
And no… just because Biden’s administration spent four years manipulating this data in a desperate bid to keep Trump out of office doesn’t mean Trump gets to play the same game to serve his own ends.
Even if his frustration is justified related to interest rates…
As we’ve often noted, the ostensibly apolitical Fed has repeatedly played politics with interest rates, cutting them last September to try and boost economic activity during the final months of the Biden administration.
During Trump’s first term in office, rates were raised seven times in less than two years. By contrast, the central bank raised rates just twice during the entire eight years Barack Obama was in office – and one of those rate hikes was approved in December of 2016, the month after Trump was elected.
Higher rates limit borrowing, essentially pumping the brakes on economic activity. Conversely, low interest rates allow for cheaper borrowing – which stimulates investment, jobs and economic growth, theoretically. Rates are lowered when the economy needs a boost. They are raised when policymakers want economic growth to cool so they can get a handle on inflation.
Keep it tuned to FITSNews as we continue to keep close tabs on national and state employment data… and its real-world (and political) fallout.
BANNER VIA: GETTY IMAGES
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THE REPORT…
(BLS)
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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2 comments
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” We’ve known for years that the BLS is forced to renegotiate the numbers after the fact. This represents an effort to correct the record to back out 3-4 years’ worth of error. The BLS gets the numbers wrong because they are in a hurry to report and do it based on an incomplete data set.
Vance’s assertion of the “useless”ness of the data is wrong; you just have to be willing to wait long enough for the data set to be complete.
The Fed has to balance the economy based on a lot more factors. If not, why not just keep cutting rates and let the economy explode? Inflation would rise and the value of the dollar would drop. Lot more to it than just keeping Trump happy!