The grim news about jobs
THE GRIM NEWS ABOUT JOBS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised the number of jobs it says were created in the year between April 2024 and March 2025. Until now, the official line was that the economy created 1.758 million jobs in that period. Now, the BLS says only 847,000 jobs were created, less than half what was originally thought. That is a stunning downward revision of 911,000 jobs.
The new numbers upended much of what everyone, regardless of political party, thought about the economy. Democrats maintained that President Joe Biden handed off a strong economy to President Donald Trump, who then weakened it. Republicans maintained that Biden handed off a weak economy to Trump, who then strengthened it. Now, it appears that from a jobs standpoint, the economy has been weaker than thought the whole time.
It is common for early job numbers to be revised; it happens all the time, but this latest revision is entirely uncommon, the largest on record. And it is evidence of a problem that is becoming more and more serious.
Last year, there was another story like this one, in which we learned that from April 2023 to March 2024, the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had originally said, wiping out most of the economy’s gains. The number was finalized at about 600,000 jobs, fewer than originally estimated, but the gap between early reports and reality was huge.
When that happened last year, candidate Donald Trump denounced the jobs numbers as fake.