Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Tuesday that 818,000 of the jobs the Biden-Harris administration created from April 2023 to March 2024 were a “fraud.”
Trump was referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recently released preliminary estimate for its annual benchmark revision that suggested there were 818,000 fewer jobs for the year ended in March 2024 than were initially reported.
Economic data is often revised, especially as more comprehensive information becomes available, to provide a clearer, more accurate, picture of the dynamics at play.
Every year – including the four years when Trump was president – the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a thorough review of the survey-based employment estimates from the monthly jobs report and reconciles those estimates with fuller employment counts measured by the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages program.
This annual process, called a benchmarking, provides a near-complete employment count, because the BLS can correct for sampling and modeling errors from the surveys and re-anchor those estimates to unemployment insurance tax records. The revision process is two-fold: A preliminary estimate is released in mid-August, and the final revision is issued in February, alongside the January jobs report.
While the recently announced preliminary revision (which amounts to 0.5% of total employment) was the largest downward revision since 2009 (which was -902,000, or -0.7%), there have been other large revisions made in recent years – notably a downward revision of 514,000 jobs (-0.3%) for the year ended in March 2019, during the Trump administration.
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