The change from April 2024 to March 2025 was the biggest revision on record. President Donald Trump fired the BLS commissioner last month over an earlier updated report.
The U.S. labor market was far weaker during much of 2024 and early 2025 than data initially showed, a new government report indicated Tuesday — injecting more uncertainty into the economy and fueling a raging debate over the figures that analysts use to understand it.
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In the largest preliminary revision to jobs data on record, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said employers had created 911,000 fewer positions from April 2024 to March 2025 than previously reported. That’s less than half as many as the agency had initially indicated. The data will be revised again and finalized early next year. Economists say that report could be less negative.
But the revision adds more evidence that the economy was already slowing even before President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs and immigration policies squeezed costs for many businesses.
And it landed just a month after Trump fired the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, over weak jobs data, accusing her without evidence of overseeing government figures that were “rigged” for political purposes, including to help Democrats in the presidential election that Trump won.
The White House said the new report showed that the BLS is “broken” and that the economy was suffering under President Joe Biden.
“This makes it very clear that President Trump inherited a much worse economy by the Biden administration than ever reported,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday. “And it also proves that the Federal Reserve is holding our monetary policy far too restrictive. Interest rates are too high. The Fed needs to cut the rates because of the mess that we inherited from the Biden administration.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a separate statement that the American people had “even more reason to doubt the integrity of [BLS] data” and condemned the agency’s leaders, who she said had “failed to improve their practices during the Biden administration.”
Many economists and policymakers across the political spectrum stress that there is no reason to question the quality of the data.
Forecasters said they had expected a large revision this year due in part to slowing business growth, shifting immigration levels, declining response rates to government surveys and an apparent downward shift in the broader economy.
“These revisions don’t really change my perspective about the labor market, which was already reasonably pessimistic,” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. “We knew the labor market was cooling over this period. A lot of other indicators came down. And in the process of that happening, we added less jobs.”
The three major stock indexes sank Tuesday morning on news of the massive downward revisions. But they rallied by midday, and all closed up slightly, as investors look ahead to rate cuts widely expected at next week’s Federal Reserve meeting.
The new annual revisions provide a more accurate snapshot of the labor market before new economic forces began to take hold — including higher tariffs and stronger immigration enforcement from the Trump administration.
Those forces have lately weighed on the labor market, which could be heading for a downturn. Monthly jobs data published last week revealed a rising unemployment rate and weaker-than-expected job creation of just 22,000 new positions in August. Even more concerning: The data showed the labor market shed jobs in June, the first such losses since the coronavirus pandemic.
The Trump administration shrugged off last week’s report as temporary, saying it expects a resurgence of new jobs and advanced manufacturing as a result of the president’s trade and immigration policies.
Most of the revisions announced Tuesday reflect the labor market under Biden. The report does not change estimates of job gains since March.
The closely watched monthly jobs reports are based on surveys of about 121,000 businesses and government agencies — a small share of the millions of U.S. employers. So the figures become more accurate when they are later calibrated with data from state unemployment offices. When the economy is rapidly growing or shrinking — as it did during the pandemic, or as it can at the start of a recession — large changes can result, because it is harder for surveys to capture how many businesses are opening or shutting down.
The preliminary revisions announced this week bring the average monthly pace of job gains during the year ending in March to just over 70,000, down from 147,000. Tuesday’s report does not indicate when the revisions took place over the 12-month period; that information will be released when the data is finalized early next year.
The annual revisions removed about 0.6 percent of all U.S. employment, the largest percentage fix since 2009.
The changes affected many sectors but especially leisure and hospitality. The report downgraded job gains in that industry, which includes hotels and restaurants, by 176,000 positions. Retail and wholesale trade also took a hit. And the information sector, which includes media, tech and telecoms, lost the largest share of jobs, about 67,000 positions, or 2.3 percent of its total employment.
Some economists argue that the labor market is still solid. The unemployment rate remains relatively low, at 4.3 percent, as do layoffs. Lower levels of immigration could mean that fewer new jobs are needed to support the population, compared with recent years, to keep the unemployment rate stable.
Last year, the preliminary revisions to jobs data drew an uproar. BLS reported that the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March 2024, which at the time was the biggest fix to federal jobs data in 15 years. Trump jumped on the revisions to accuse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Biden of “fraudulently manipulating job statistics” for political purposes. The final revisions published early this year ended up showing a smaller change, a downgrade of roughly 598,000 fewer jobs.
Economist Michael Strain of the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute said that he believes this week’s news will “unfortunately contribute to the narrative that there’s something fishy going on at BLS. It’s possible that we’ll see an even more aggressive response from the president.”
He added: “I think there is not a shred of evidence to believe that there’s any political bias in the data and there’s not a shred of evidence to believe the data are being manipulated in any way for any reason. In addition, I think there’s lots of scope to improve the data, and that’s something that I think would require money.”
Since firing McEntarfer in early August, Trump has nominated BLS critic and Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni to lead the agency. Antoni is facing scrutiny from policymakers and economists for his pro-MAGA partisanship, relative lack of experience and what critics have called a misunderstanding of economic data, which could threaten his confirmation hearing in the coming weeks. Antoni has said he is interested in improving the accuracy of BLS data, and the White House has said that Trump tapped Antoni to solve those problems.
Erica Groshen, who led the BLS under President Barack Obama, said the large revisions announced this week also reflected lower participation in government surveys. Only about 35 percent of employers agreed to participate in voluntary jobs surveys, according to data from April, down from 74 percent a decade ago.
Berger, of the Burning Glass Institute, said he has been giving less credence to monthly job creation data in recent years, which has been highly distorted by recent shifts in labor supply, including the surge and subsequent crackdown in immigration.
Instead, Berger and many analysts and policymakers have been paying closer attention to the unemployment rate, hiring and layoff levels, and employment ratios, which have revealed periods of weakness over the past year. For example, the unemployment rate climbed last summer, contributing to the Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates in September 2024.
“If your perspective has been ‘Wow, these job numbers are good, so the labor market is strong,’ you probably should have changed your mind on that a long time ago,” Berger said.
