The count of payroll jobs is likely to be 911,000 lower than previously thought after revisions are made, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday. 

The agency, which has been under fire from President Donald Trump for downward jobs revisions, gave notice of the lower total number in the form of a preliminary “benchmark” revision to the payroll jobs estimate, part of a routine update process. The final revised number will be made public in February. 

Recommended Stories

• FTC commissioner says populist shift among Republicans is here to stay
• Capitalism favorability on the decline: Poll
• China's exports to US dropped 33% in August

The announcement adds to evidence that the labor market is weaker than recent official numbers have indicated. 

Although a large downward revision was expected, analysts anticipated that the bad news might trigger a negative reaction from Trump, who in August fired the BLS commissioner after the release of a monthly jobs report that showed negative revisions to previous months’ gains. 

The preliminary revision announced Tuesday is different from the revisions to the previous two months’ jobs numbers that are included in every monthly jobs report. 

Instead, it is part of an annual process for adjusting the estimates of payroll jobs, which are based on the monthly survey of establishments. The BLS rebenchmarks those numbers to a comprehensive count of jobs from the BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which is a quarterly assessment of employment and wages reported by employers, covering more than 95% of U.S. jobs. 

Recent years have seen unusually large revisions because of several factors that have made it more difficult to get accurate numbers. 

One is falling response rates, which worsened over the course of years and then rapidly fell following the pandemic. 

The other is the major distortions created by the massive influx in illegal immigrants during President Joe Biden’s tenure. Illegal immigration employment, for example, might show up in the survey of establishments, but not in the QCEW.