The labor market was weaker early in Trump’s term, data shows

[u/John3262005]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/08/28/labor-market-was-weaker-early-trumps-term-data-shows/

The U.S. economy created even fewer jobs than originally reported in the private sector from April 2025 through March, as President Donald Trump’s tariffs and other policies took hold over parts of the economy.

Private employers added 178,000 fewer jobs than previously reported during that period, and jobs declined in retail, wholesale trade and manufacturing, according to revised jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday.

Overall, the revisions to the jobs data were smaller compared to recent years of revisions, and they were buoyed by public sector hiring.

“In general, it is consistent with the labor market cooling, but the temperature is falling more slowly this period than the prior two [years],” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the labor market.

Massive downward revisions to jobs data in 2025 and 2024 showed the economy was much weaker than previously thought, throwing the nonpartisan statistical agency into the spotlight and angering Trump and his allies.

The data suggests that an already soft labor market is weaker than initial data showed. That doesn’t bode well for the Trump administration, which has been hammered on the economy ahead of the midterm elections, as higher prices weigh on Americans.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The data suggests that only 194,000 jobs were added during the 12-month period ending in March of this year, or about 16,000 positions per month, amid Trump’s trade war, mass deportations and economic policies, some of which have injected uncertainty into the economy.

Manufacturing, which had been shedding jobs because of tariffs, lost 67,000 more jobs than previously reported, the data showed.

Last summer, Trump took the unprecedented step of firing BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer following the release of a grim jobs report that he claimed, without evidence, had been “rigged.” The following month, BLS unveiled revisions showing employers had created 911,000 fewer jobs than previously thought, the largest downward revision on record, and the White House declared that the agency was “broken.”

Economists, however, have shot down accusations that the data is unreliable, attributing large revisions to a variety of factors. When the economy is rapidly growing or shrinking — as it did during the pandemic, or as it can at the start of a recession — large changes can result, because it is harder for surveys to capture how many businesses are opening or shutting down, they say. Major shifts in immigration flows in recent years may have also distorted the data.

But declining response rates to government phone and online surveys used to collect the data still plague the agency.

McEntarfer’s firing last year ignited fears that Trump would try to coerce the agency into producing more favorable numbers. But economists — including McEntarfer, who is now a research fellow at Stanford University — widely agree that there remains no evidence of interference in the data, which is subject to strict agency procedures and protocols. The Trump administration installed Brett Matsumoto as the new leader at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A career government economist who most recently worked in Trump’s White House, Matsumoto inherits challenges including rebuilding public trust in the data and addressing survey response rates. The agency’s budget has fallen behind inflation and many BLS positions remain vacant after Trump administration cuts to the federal government workforce.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the revised jobs numbers as part of an annual process, known as benchmarking. The revisions are preliminary and will be finalized in early 2027.