On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published a revision of its latest job numbers, a report that shows just how far off its estimates of overall employment were from reality.
The latest data just confirms what many already suspected—that the situation is worse than we thought. There’s something incredibly wrong at BLS, and for the sake of our economy, it’s time to fix it.
From March 2024 to March 2025—a period mostly covering the final year of the Biden administration — BLS overestimated job numbers by 911,000. In other words, for that period, the nation added a stunning 911,000 fewer jobs than were originally reported, the largest such error on record.
Let that sink in.
US JOB GROWTH THROUGH MARCH REVISED LOWER BY 911K
But it’s a lot worse than that. Over the last three years, the BLS has overcounted nearly 3 million jobs that didn’t exist.
These aren’t random errors when every revision skews in the same direction.
Even more troubling, the BLS numbers released last week pointed in opposite directions. One survey showed 22,000 jobs created while the other suggested nearly 300,000. Which is it?
By relying on faulty data and skewed reporting methods, BLS essentially invented millions of jobs that weren’t there. That flawed data was then used by the Biden administration and the legacy media to promote a job market that didn’t exist, instead of reporting the weak jobs’ recovery.
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For an agency that describes itself as the “principal fact-finding agency for the federal government” in labor economics and statistics, that’s a shocking and intolerable error.
These kinds of miscounts have become the norm for an agency tasked with producing data that regularly steers public policy and drives private economic market swings.
BLS doesn’t just publish job reports — it also tracks critical issues like inflation, running the Consumer Price Index that measures how far Americans’ money goes.
This isn’t just an academic exercise. There are real policy implications that result from faulty numbers. Bad numbers lead to bad policy.
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Policymakers throughout the government rely on BLS data to shape decisions on taxes, spending and monetary policies. Americans across the country rely on BLS data to judge how elected officials’ decisions affect their daily lives and the issues that matter to them, meaning flawed data could change the outcomes of our elections.
Most of the period covered in this week’s report took place in the waning days of President Joe Biden’s tenure. For his last year in office, BLS job numbers were off by more than 50%.
That overestimation came during a highly contentious election focused largely on the economy and centered on issues like jobs and inflation. Flawed BLS data painted a far better picture of Biden’s economy than reality—potentially pushing some voters to favor him (and later, Harris) over Trump.
President Trump ended up winning the election regardless—and he’s now proven that his concerns about BLS are absolutely correct. President Trump believes the numbers were “rigged” to make the economy to appear better than it was. Perhaps. Or maybe it was just sheer number counting incompetence.
Either way, this cannot happen again.
Trump ran on the promise to restore transparency, accountability and efficiency to the federal government. That’s a mission he needs to take to BLS to restore it as the gold standard of jobs and labor data. That means depoliticizing the agency, improving data collection and refining its communication with the American people.
There is something seriously wrong at BLS. It can and must be fixed. Americans should back the president’s efforts to do so—including his nominee.
Steve Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former senior economic adviser to Donald Trump. His latest book is “The Trump Economic Miracle.”
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