On Wednesday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a preliminary benchmark revision to the number of nonfarm payrolls from April 2023 through March 2024. According to the report, the number of new jobs added to the economy during this period was revised downward by 818,000. In other words, far fewer jobs were actually created than the Biden-Harris BLS had previously reported.
This is huge because President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been touting job growth as a major accomplishment of their administration. And coming as it did during the “joyous” Democratic National Convention, made it all the sweeter.
Although the BLS frequently makes small adjustments to previous monthly jobs data, today’s revision should set off alarm bells among voters.
The Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy rapidly between 2021 and 2023. Their intervention took the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which depository institutions trade federal funds – balances held at Federal Reserve Banks – with each other) from 0.25% to 5.50%. The rate hikes were intended to tame the record-high inflation triggered by the Biden-Harris administration’s reckless spending.
Yet, despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive action, the number of new jobs continued to tick up, month after month, confounding many economists. Biden and Harris attributed the strong employment data to their superb stewardship of the economy. This report solved the mystery. It will also make it difficult for economists to trust employment reports – or any government data – in the future.
Although it’s impossible to know whether the BLS’s misstatement of employment data was intentional or simply an error, given the drastic lengths to which Democrats have already gone to keep Trump out of the White House — the 2016 Russian collusion hoax, two Trump impeachments, the October 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, the government’s insistence that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was a conspiracy, four bogus Trump indictments, two spurious civil lawsuits in New York, concerted efforts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in several blue states, and the Democrats’ extraordinary efforts to hide Biden’s deteriorating cognitive health — it’s become more and more difficult to trust this administration.
On Tuesday evening, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo joined Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” to weigh in on the expected revision which Bloomberg had reported on earlier in the day. At the time, estimates were for nonfarm payrolls to be adjusted downward by 600,000 to 1 million jobs.
I am including a large portion of their discussion because it does a thorough job of explaining the meaning of a downward revision to such a widely watched economic indicator and demonstrates how momentous this occasion actually is.
Ingraham noted that if this estimate was correct, it would be the biggest downward revision in 15 years.
Bartiromo found it “incredible,” telling Ingraham:
You’re talking about up to a million jobs that were basically fake. That we thought they were there, but they weren’t. And tomorrow, we’re going to hear from the Bureau of Labor Statisics on exactly how many jobs were actually nonexistent.
What happens is the BLS reports jobs … on the first Friday of every month. They do that based on a survey of businesses from employers. But then they get the state tax records, that encompasses all jobs. So they have to revise it.
But people are questioning why it is that we are over here [at the Democratic National Convention] celebrating all this job creation every month, Joe Biden coming out doing press conferences, telling us how great his economy is and how he created all these jobs only to see a massive revision several months later.
From April 2023 to March 2024, there were 2.9 million jobs created – we thought – but they’re going to revise that up to a million jobs lower.
Referring to the revision as “a real scandal,” Ingraham called for an investigation. “To regular people, this just looks like putting a finger on the scale, to make Joe Biden and Kamala Harris look better going into an election cycle. … Maybe that’s not what happened, but to regular people, that’s what it looks like.”
“Of course,” Bartiromo replied, “because you’re saying, ‘Oh, we thought that it was 242,000 jobs every month for the last year, and, in fact, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve is saying that it’s more like 130,000.’” She questioned such a “large disparity in exactly how many jobs there were and how many jobs you [BLS] said there were.”
“I think this is going to raise the expectation that we’re going to go into a recession,” Bartiromo said. She cited a report from Evercore which said “the likelihood of a recession in the next six months is actually heightened now.”
“Every American watching tonight has to realize that this was the shining glory of their economic bragging,” Ingraham said. “Jobs created. The media … all the press poodles, Biden, Harris, Walz … Nancy Pelosi, over and over again. And we find out in the middle of the Democratic convention that it was a fraud. That number was fraudulent.”
“And so, what are they going to do?,” Ingraham asked, “tell the Fed to lower interest rates – to help them again in an election cycle?”
“If, in fact, we learn that the economy is so much weaker than everybody thought, then you’re going to have more bets that the Federal Reserve is going to lower interest rates in September,” Bartiromo said. “But don’t forget that the Fed is facing this tsunami of spending. It’s so disingenuous to come out and say that the reason we have inflation where it is – up 20% – is because of price gouging … and not mention $7 trillion in spending.”
Below, Trump responded to the imminent report.
And finally, the Center for Immigration Studies claims that virtually all of the jobs created since 2019 have gone to the foreign-born.
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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