Former President Donald Trump is pushing a new narrative that the Biden administration has falsified job numbers and was "caught" in the act — something the former president proclaimed was a "massive scandal" on Truth Social and repeated at his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday.
But his claims are completely false, Philip Bump wrote for The Washington Post. And they're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles job numbers.
Trump's claim stems from a revision of released job numbers over the last year which saw them drop by 818,000 — is a fairly large revision. But, Bump noted, it's a routine thing that the bureau does as it gets more information.
In fact, he wrote, by Trump's logic, "In a massive scandal, the Trump administration was caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics in August 2019 to hide the true extent of the economic ruin it had inflicted upon America. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released at that point showed that the administration padded the numbers with an extra 501,000 jobs that do not exist, and never did."
In reality, Bump said, neither Trump nor Biden faked any numbers. The BLS just posted a preliminary estimate it had to revise later.
And while 0.5 percent of the expected labor force not existing is not good news and the most significant such revision since 2009, it still means the economy added about 2 million jobs over the last year. The main impact of the revision will be to put more pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
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"What's important to keep in mind here is that the adjustment also doesn't do much to address the broader point Trump wants to make," wrote Bump. "He hopes to insinuate that there's some conspiracy to misrepresent the numbers, yes, but that's obviously false given the explanation above. (It also doesn't make any sense politically: if the administration were inventing data to boost Harris, why wouldn't they invent a different adjustment or not release it?)
"But Trump also wants to suggest that job growth under Biden has been weaker than Democrats like to argue. (This is similarly why he likes to claim that more than 100 percent of new employment (?) is going to immigrants, which it isn't.)"
Trump may desperately want to see a conspiracy in the latest updates, Bump concluded, "But there's no such conspiracy, just government bureaucracy slowly doing its thing. And there’s no real comparison on job addition, either."
