Topline
The Trump administration cast doubt on the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after it revised jobs data over the past year to show the U.S. economy added nearly 1 million fewer jobs than previously reported—echoing earlier claims made by President Donald Trump as he’s called for new leadership at the agency.
Vice President JD Vance wrote “it’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become” and suggested the revision should “restore confidence,” resharing a tweet from Navy Federal Credit Union chief economist Heather Long that said the revision shows “the labor market was weak even before the tariffs kicked in.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also accused the BLS of having “failed the American people,” but said the report showing the U.S. economy added 911,000 fewer jobs than previously reported between April of last year and March of this year proves “that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken.”
Leavitt said in a statement “there is no room for such a significant and consistent amount of error,” though, as Long noted, the BLS revises data every year, and the larger revisions are “mainly due to problems accounting for new/closed businesses since the pandemic.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also blamed the Biden administration for the data changing so much, alleging BLS leadership “failed to improve their practices” during his tenure, “calling into question the motivation behind their inaction.”
The criticism echoes Trump, who ousted former BLS chief Erika McEntarfer earlier this year and accused her of manipulating jobs data during the 2024 election to help Biden.
The BLS released a preliminary report Tuesday that found employers added 849,000 total jobs for the year ending in March, opposed to previous data that showed 1.76 million new jobs. The Treasury Department and analysts at major U.S. banks predicted the revision, which was slightly higher than the revision issued for last year’s annual data, when the BLS lowered jobs growth by 818,000 jobs.
Some economists have defended the BLS against Trump’s criticism. The National Association for Business Economists said in a statement it “stands firmly with the dedicated economists and statisticians at BLS and across federal agencies.”
Congress has yet to confirm Trump’s replacement for McEntarfer, Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni.