The U.S. economy added more than 900,000 fewer jobs than previously estimated in the 12 months ending in March, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.
The substantial revision could further fan the White House’s attempts to pressure the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and press the embattled Bureau of Labor Statistics to overhaul its data-collection processes.
BLS said that the difference between the results of its routine survey and the more comprehensive Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages totaled 911,000 between March 2024 and March 2025. The QCEW is primarily pulled from state administrative records tied to the unemployment insurance tax system.
According to BLS, businesses that responded to its surveys reported higher employment numbers than indicated by the QCEW, and those that did not reply also had lower employment over that span than those that did.
The so-called benchmark revision is subject to change when it is finalized early next year in conjunction with the release of the January jobs numbers. A year ago, the preliminary figures indicated an overestimate of about 818,000 that was lowered to just under 600,000 in the final calculation released in February.
The preliminary write-down wipes out about half of the job growth during that span, which covers former President Joe Biden’s final months in office as well as the early weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Trump fired Biden-appointed BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer in early August after a soft jobs report. Numbers released last Friday indicated further softening in the jobs market, with only 22,000 added last month — and new data showing that the economy lost jobs back in June, the first net decrease since December 2020.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump seized on the preliminary benchmark findings to accuse the Biden administration of manipulating the data to benefit Democrats. The Trump administration has argued that the president wants BLS data to be more precise and not as subject to wide changes.
“Today’s massive downward revision gives the American people even more reason to doubt the integrity of data being published by BLS,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a release. “Leaders at the bureau failed to improve their practices during the Biden administration, utilizing outdated methods that rendered a once reliable system completely ineffective and calling into question the motivation behind their inaction.”
Trump has nominated conservative economist E.J. Antoni to replace McEntarfer, though he has attracted scrutiny for firebrand social media posts and the partisan nature of his work as the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist.
