For all of New York Times chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman’s fussbudgeting over President Donald Trump supposedly compromising the reliability of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a new report pointing to gross BLS ineptitude just made him look like a complete idiot.
The Bidenomics simp Casselman was forced to report that the BLS overestimated jobs growth during the Biden era — AGAIN — this time by nearly 1 million (-911,000) in the 12-month period ending March 2025, the largest revision on record. Casselman conceded that it was the “latest sign that the labor market, until recently a bright spot in the economy, may be weaker than it initially appeared.”
Remember: this scandalously politicized Fake News came out during the election season.
What makes this worse is that Casselman is the same person who co-wrote an embellished pre-election Day report slobbering all over Biden jobs market October 5, 2024: “The Job Market Is Chugging Along, Completing a Solid Economic Picture.” Like the cherry on top of this luscious-looking pile of crow, Casselman praised how “And the incoming evidence points to a clear conclusion: The economy is robust … In fact, the [September BLS] report reinforced that by many measures, the job market is as healthy as it has ever been.”
Oof!
Oh, but there’s more. Casselman recently published a screed decrying Trump for appointing Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni to eventually run the BLS after firing his Biden-appointed predecessor and Democrat donor Erika McEntarfer for allegedly rigging numbers. Casselman smeared Antoni as a “conservative economist with a history of distorting statistics to support his political arguments.”
HELLO?? What can be more distorted than consistently overestimating jobs growth by massive figures? Last year in August, a preliminary BLS estimate projected an overestimated jobs growth by a whopping 818,000 jobs, the most substantial revision since 2009 at the time.
Errors of that nature going that far left on left-to-right scale isn’t just an innocent Oops! Directionally speaking, that’s west.
But Casselman, behaving like the typical obnoxious Democrat hack, tried to spin the latest massive revision. “The revision covered the final months of the Biden administration and the early months of Mr. Trump’s second presidency,” as if Trump’s policies had really anything to do with it that early in his administration. “The report did not provide details on when the overestimates took place, or if they were evenly distributed across the 12-month period,” Casselman continued, splitting hairs.
But over at The Financial Times, that outlet conceded that this latest revision “will be a boost to President Donald Trump, who has argued that his aggressive tariff and immigration policies were not to blame for recent signs of weakness in the labour market.”
CNBC went further, estimating that "[d]ownward revisions since the cutoff date in that report suggest that the reduction in payroll growth has been actually around 1.2 million for the past 16 months." Even more damning was FT’s concession that this “downgrade is far greater than usual and will add fuel to the debate over the quality of the agency’s monthly employment reports."
Rather than attacking Antoni’s credibility again, Casselman had to eke out a straight reporting style on Trump’s actions prior to the latest BLS report, perhaps he knows he has egg all over his face:
The White House has pointed to the big revisions as evidence that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been struggling to measure the economy accurately, and that Mr. Trump was right to fire Erika McEntarfer, its Senate-confirmed leader. The president has nominated E.J. Antoni, a longtime critic of the agency, to replace her.
Jeez-a-loo! It's like an all-you-can-eat crow buffet! Bon appétit Ben!