This Jobs Report Is the Trump Presidency in a Nutshell
Guest article by Julie Su, former Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor and currently a senior fellow at The Century Foundation
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This month, after another disappointing Jobs Report, President Donald Trump is once again looking around for someone to blame. There is no pandemic, despite RFK’s best efforts; no external supply shocks that Trump himself didn’t cause through his tariff regime. Donald Trump has spiked the baton he was handed by the Biden administration, and he has no one to blame but himself.
This time around, he’s going after the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS, an agency that collects economic data about our country and workforce, poses a danger to Trump because it counters his lies with data. It is made up of career public servants, the very people Trump has been vilifying since day one. The Trump administration has already tried to strangle the agency by slashing its workforce by 20 percent, and after the disgraceful firing of the Commissioner last month, the career staff who make up the rest of the BLS knew that an honest August Jobs Report would incur the wrath of the Trump administration. But they did their jobs anyway. Unlike everyone in Trump World, BLS employees are unwilling to protect their own jobs above all else.
BLS’s work is complex and requires tremendous expertise, and Trump ridicules and seeks to discredit anything complex. But he does so at all of our peril: billions of dollars of public and private investment rely on these numbers. The Federal Reserve uses them to set interest rates. They give policymakers a guide to what’s working and who it’s working for. They signal whether a recession is coming so it can be mitigated or avoided through smart, thoughtful decision-making by those in power. Without data to inform those decisions, we’re just supposed to trust the president who has shown time and time again that truth is an inconvenient barrier to his self-serving version of reality.
When it comes to collection of real-time economic data, speed and completeness are often a trade-off, but even with limited resources, BLS has been the gold standard of economic data collection across the globe. They work to release numbers quickly through monthly jobs reports so lawmakers and businesses can make adjustments in real time, but they also release additional data when they get it to give the fullest picture possible. That way, decision-makers can make investments, states and local governments can plan their budgets, and policymakers can evaluate their actions with the most confidence that they’re making the best short- and long-term decisions. These revisions are not signs of error but evidence of transparency.
BLS recently released its estimated revisions for this year as scheduled. It’s not something they hide. It’s not something they manipulate to make themselves or the economy look better or worse to serve a political purpose. As BLS’s own employees recently said in a statement, “BLS data has been trusted because its methods are public, vetted, and transparent. BLS publishes its sources, publishes its methods, and its data revisions follow a set schedule. The public doesn’t have to guess whether the jobs numbers are real.” To put the most recent estimated revisions in context, the total revisions represent approximately 0.6% of overall employment.
As Trump talks about creating a historic manufacturing boom, the data shows he has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. As he touts an economy that’s working for American workers, Trump’s economy has more workers looking for a job than job openings for the first time since the depths of the pandemic. Despite promising to stop inflation on day one, working- and middle-class Americans are still being squeezed financially as Trump cuts taxes for the wealthy and massive corporations.
People like to say that numbers don’t lie, but the Trump administration is trying its best to ensure their numbers match their narrative rather than the other way around. This is an incredibly reckless and dangerous path to be going down, and once we go down it, it might take decades to rebuild the data collection apparatus and, more importantly, the trust of the people who rely on that data. Especially when there is another path for the administration: actually govern in a way that works for working people. Invest in manufacturing and onshoring, like we did in the Biden administration to the tune of over 700,000 manufacturing jobs, rather than kill jobs because the president doesn’t like wind turbines. Ensure that the jobs being created are good jobs, with benefits and protections that every worker deserves, rather than give corporations a pass to cut corners on safety and steal workers’ wages. Give workers a seat at the table to negotiate for higher wages and better working conditions, rather than breaking public sector unions and making it harder to organize in the private sector.
All of what we’re seeing from the Trump administration is a choice to put corporations ahead of caretakers, the wealthy ahead of workers, and the bosses ahead of the busboys. We know that a different economy is possible. We know that the promise of a good job is the foundation of a strong middle class. We know that federal investments in infrastructure, clean energy, health care, and childcare—all things the Trump administration has reversed—make everyday Americans, not just the wealthy, better off. We know that when native-born and immigrant workers do better, everyone does better, and our economy is stronger, fairer, and more resilient. We know that when you make the pie bigger for everyone, working people don’t have to fight each other for ever-shrinking slices. We don’t need data to tell us that, but we won’t let Trump undermine all faith in data in his ongoing assault on the truth.
Julie Su is the former Acting U.S. Secretary of Labor and currently a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she works on a range of issues focused on protecting labor rights, growing worker power, and advancing equity in the economy.
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