During the Democrats’ national convention week in Chicago, the federal agency responsible for tracking employment trends handed them an unpleasant surprise. The previously reported employment gains for the year were reduced by 818,000 jobs, casting a shadow over the Biden-Harris administration.
The job gains claimed under the Biden and Harris tenure were once a point of perceived strength amidst a persistently high inflation rate. However, this latest revelation has left many questioning the authenticity and accuracy of these numbers.
Former President Donald Trump was quick to challenge the integrity of the reported job numbers. He accused Biden and Harris of falsely claiming to have created 818,000 jobs, caustically referring to them as ‘fake job numbers’. On August 21, he escalated his allegations, suggesting the administration manipulated job statistics.
Trump’s post on Truth Social further claimed that the Biden-Harris administration had ‘fraudulently manipulated Job Statistics’ to conceal their economic pitfall. He tore into the administration, asserting they artificially inflated job figures by 818,000, jobs he claimed to be non-existent.
The recalibration of the past year’s job numbers resulted in a reduction of 818,000 positions, knocking job gains down by half a percentage point. This significant downward adjustment, the largest such correction in over 15 years, has raised alarms among several economists.
Economics professionals on either side of the ideological divide might refute Trump’s claims of bookmarks tampering, dismissing them as the annual refinement of data that’s inherently imperfect. They suggest that rather than committing fraud, the administration was having course corrections, which is a standard practice.
The validity of Trump’s allegations was outrightly dismissed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum. His thoughts paralleled the larger consensus that these are routine revisions, not a deliberate manipulation of employment data.
The annual ‘benchmarking’ adjustment was announced on Wednesday by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS uses more precise state-based unemployment insurance data for this process, a contrast to the less accurate employer-based data they use for monthly employment reports.
Due to this precision, the BLS found that the job count for March was 818,000 fewer than initially reported, causing both economic concern and supporting arguments for lowering Federal Reserve interest rates at the forthcoming September meeting.
The Biden-Harris administration attempts to shift the blame of this economic downturn elsewhere, but with little substantiation. Anna Kelly, a spokesperson from the Republican National Committee, asserts with a pointed tone that it was ‘the economic crisis she created’.
Despite the stern allegations from the Trump camp, there hasn’t been any solid proof provided to back the claim that the administration tampered with the job statistics. The BLS, composed of trained civil servants, has maintained its reputation of political neutrality.
The Bureau’s well-defined recalibration procedures, in use for years, are by no means a concoction of the current administration. Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, refutes any conspiracy theories around the revision process.
Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University and former deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomics in the Treasury Department’s Office of Economic Policy, notes the revision process is a long-standing tradition. These adjustments, she mentions, have occurred during Trump’s presidency as well.
While the routine revision has indeed punctured the Biden-Harris administration’s inflated reporting, there is no evidence pointing to any foul play. Trump’s stark allegations lack credence, given the uniformity of the processes used over the years by the BLS in their data compilation.