For 85 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a detailed monthly report on the nation’s private and public jobs situation. The latest edition will appear Friday morning amid growing reports of economic disaster in the offing.
Experts have forecast that 148,000 to 170,000 new jobs were added last month. That compares with the BLS’s tally of 143,000 in the previous month’s report. The payroll processing firm ADP, which has issued its own report on private sector jobs for about 25 years, said this morning that the economy gained just 77,000 such jobs last month. But ADP frequently calculates a jobs gain or loss that is tens of thousands different than what the BLS comes up with, even when accounting for the fact ADP doesn’t include public sector jobs.
If BLS does issue a healthy report Friday, you can expect our Outlaw Prez to praise it and himself for making it happen. If it’s not, you can expect he may say something along the lines he’s been hewing to since the 2016 presidential campaign, namely that numbers from the BLS and the Bureau of Economic Analysis during President Obama’s terms of office were “phony” and “totally fiction.”
However, with Obama’s presidency in the rear-view mirror, a good jobs report came out in March 2017, and Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer said to reporters’ laughs at a White House briefing that the new president wanted everyone to know the unemployment rate “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” Hilarious, except he was serious.
Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
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Of course, if the numbers in Friday’s report do turn out lower than forecast, Trump may just go for the tried-and-true blather and blame it on President Joe Biden, mumbling something about things getting better as the months go by.
Trump certainly didn’t stop claiming manipulation when Biden became president. So there’s zero reason to believe he will behave any differently this time around. If a report is strong on his watch, it’s all because he’s brilliant, while a weak report will be labeled a product of deep-state actors manipulating the numbers. Just as he also views favorable reports published with a Democrat in office a result of deep-state actors manipulating the numbers.
For instance, when last month’s jobs report was issued, the annual revision showed 818,000 fewer jobs created in the previous 12 months than had previously been reported, Trump went from his usual simple lying into major concoction mode. He asserted the Biden administration had thought this downward revision could be concealed until after the election, “but there was a whistleblower, and the whistleblower couldn’t stand what they were doing, and blew the whistle on them, and they got caught.” As Daniel Dale at CNN reported:
This is fiction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly releases the preliminary revised data in August, and it had disclosed the precise date of this particular data release — August 21 — weeks in advance.
William Beach, a conservative economist who was appointed by Trump to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote on social media: “For those who think the big revision to the BLS jobs numbers ‘leaked’ and was meant to come out after the election, remember that BLS always announces its draft revisions in August and announced this year’s date, August 21, many months ago. It is important to check your facts.”
“Fiction” has such a softening effect over, say, “fabrication” or just plain, old “lies.” As for facts, they’re as effective against Trump as nerf balls. But I digress.
Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics since January 2024.
Commissioner Beach left the bureau two years ago, and last January the Senate confirmed President Biden’s replacement—Erika McEntarfer. Six weeks into Trump 2.0, she’s still in that post.
With DOGE axing jobs willy-nilly across multiple federal agencies, some people may be expecting BLS stats this week to reflect the damage. But that’s unlikely.
First, the surveys the BLS relies on to compile its jobs reports are completed on or close to the 12th of each month. This means the latest report will only cover half of January and half of February, and Trump didn’t announce mass layoffs until Valentine’s Day. Moreover, even if the administration somehow beats the courts — one of which has already called layoffs of probationary employees illegal — a successful 10% slash of federal employees would mean around 200,000 would lose their jobs by Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year. Obviously disastrous for many of them and harmful to agencies’ missions and morale, but only a blip among the tens of millions of workers across the economy.
For instance, Betsy Stevenson, a labor economist now at the University of Michigan, told CNBC: “First of all, we obviously won’t see [big federal job losses] in the [Friday] employment report because these layoffs happened, very smartly, right after the reference week. That’s a very clever way to try to keep these things out of those monthly reports we see, because as long as people find a job before the next month’s reference week — before the week of March 12 — they won’t show up at all.”
She noted that most of the millions of people who leave their jobs each month aren’t “losing” them. They’re quitting and they have a plan for what’s next. “But I think a lot of these federal workers were absolutely blindsided, and that’s going to change their behavior. I also think that there is a chill in the air about who might lose their job next, and that can start to reduce spending. In fact, I would recommend to my friends, ‘cut your spending now, build your nest egg, we don’t know what’s going to happen, there’s a lot of uncertainty.’ Whenever you’re in an economy where a lot of people feel they need to build their nest egg, cut back their spending, you start to see the economy slow.”
With giant budget cuts and economy-shredding tariffs possibly in play—though Trump appears ready to retreat on that—a mere slowing would be a blessing compared to what’s likely coming. Ever more economists are looking with alarm at near-term prospects. Carnage might be too mild a word to describe what the job reports will look like in coming months.
Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research has looked beyond the likely jobs numbers in the upcoming report. He says we won’t see much impact from DOGE cuts for the reasons cited above. But he also notes that we will probably see data reflecting a slowdown in hiring and in wage growth, cuts in hours and productivity, and continued slowing of manufacturing and construction.
“Apart from the pandemic, most of us have probably never seen such a rapid turn in the labor market as we are likely witnessing now,” Baker writes. “We went from perhaps the strongest labor market in half a century to one marked by uncertainty in almost every sector. Perhaps we will get a clearer picture of the economy’s direction in the months ahead, but for now, much is up in the air and it is not a good environment for businesses to make plans.”
Such plans are likely to include significant hiring hesitancy.
One barometer of where we’re headed comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow, a forecasting model. While the official growth rate of inflation-adjusted gross domestic product is released with a delay, the GDP model provides a “nowcast.” This, as the Atlanta Fed notes “is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model.”
Currently, that’s an astonishing -2.8%, and the trajectory as shown below is not soothing. When GPDNow updates Thursday, it’s likely to be worse.
GDP is a flawed measurement for which various experts — like Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz — have failed to find a good alternative. But for now, it’s the most comprehensive gauge we have, and if the GDPNow model turns out to be even half accurate, the jobs reports after this week’s will be as horrible as the administration whose wrecking ball economic policies have just gotten rolling.
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Related: Economic growth is slowing — so Trump wants to redefine “economic growth”
