The Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Labor overestimated job gains by 818,000 and was forced to revise downward the total figures. Preliminary annual benchmarks review.
The Labor Department previously estimated the economy would add about 242,000 jobs each month, but a compilation of payroll data from April 2023 to March 2024 revealed that only 174,000 jobs were added each month.
Nearly half of the downward revision was in the professional and business services sector, which lost 358,000 jobs. The Labor Department also overstated leisure and hospitality by 150,000, retail by 129,000 and manufacturing by 115,000.
The administration’s roughly 30% revision to the employment numbers would be the biggest overestimate since 2009, but the final figures aren’t due until February 2025.
Former President Donald Trump slammed the Biden-Harris administration for exaggerating employment statistics, calling it a “huge scandal.”
On Wednesday morning, Trump Social Media“The Harris-Biden administration has been found to have rigged jobs statistics to hide the true extent of the economic devastation it has inflicted on America.”
“New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that this Administration has inflated the numbers by adding 818,000 jobs that don’t exist and never existed in the first place,” Trump continued. “The real numbers are much worse than that, and four more years of Comrade Kamala will see millions more jobs disappear overnight and inflation completely destroy the country.”
President Trump warned that a Harris-Waltz administration would wipe out Americans’ retirement savings.
“If Trump wins, we will again have the best economy in history,” he said.
“This is not a correction. This is a complete lie,” Trump said while campaigning in North Carolina on Wednesday afternoon.
Jared Bernstein, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, statement The administration defended itself, arguing that “neither the interim nor the final revisions directly affect estimates of job gains over recent months, which is important to keep in mind when assessing today’s labor market.”
“The -818,000 estimate is ‘pushed’ into a 12-month job gain of -68,000 over the period April 2023 to March 2024. If this holds (we won’t know until February 25th), job gains over that period would go from a staggering 2.9 million to a robust 2.1 million; or from about 240,000 per month to 170,000 per month. The latter is also the average over the past three months, which is strong enough to maintain the pace of economic expansion,” Bernstein continued.
“The provisional salary adjustments (which will be changed before they become official) do not change the fact that we have seen and continue to see a strong jobs recovery driven by real wage increases, robust private consumption and record small business creation,” he said.
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