The Biden administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics quietly erased 439,000 jobs from its initial employment growth reports from January through November 2023, according to Fox Business.
The BLS first estimated that over 3 million new jobs would be created in 2023. However, nearly one-fourth of the employment opportunities thought to be created never actually existed.
E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “By the time you include all the monthly revisions and the annual benchmark revision, about one-quarter of all the jobs we thought were added last year have been revised away.”
“That pattern of consistent downward revisions has happened in two prior recessions. It is a result of market conditions changing too rapidly for the BLS to adjust their methodology, which in turn causes consistent errors in measuring nonfarm payrolls,” Antoni added.
In a recent X post, Antoni highlighted the “big downward revisions” made to the BLS’ reporting. Every month, except for July, was revised to fewer jobs created than originally predicted. Current reporting excludes December, which will not be announced until January or February.
According to initial reporting, 216,000 jobs were added in December. However, 52,000 were government positions, bringing the total of government employees to a record-breaking 23 million, the DCNF reported. In other words, a surge in government hiring has been inflating the job growth numbers. The health care and social assistance sector, largely funded by the government, also created tens of thousands of jobs.
In 2022, downward revisions were made in five months, erasing 66,000 estimated jobs. In 2021, only one month was corrected for overestimating job growth, and over 2 million positions were added to final reporting following a rebound from COVID shutdowns.
BLS employment reporting estimates impact market movements and interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. The agency uses the “birth-death” model, which estimates business deaths and business births, to calculate job growth projections. The method has been criticized as unreliable.
David Rosenberg, founder of Rosenberg Research Associates, posted on X, “Time to stop trading off the payroll data. The downward revisions in 2023 totalled an epic 443k. More than 40% of payroll growth in 2023 didn’t even come from the survey but from the fairy-tale ‘Birth-Death’ model.”
President Biden and his administration have taken credit for 13 to 14 million newly created jobs. However, most of those positions were recoveries from COVID-era shutdowns. The actual number of created jobs under the Biden administration since February 2020 stands at about 4.86 million. As of October, nearly 8.4 million Americans have multiple jobs to keep up with inflation, according to Labor Department reporting.
The BLS did not respond to a request for comment, the DCNF reported.
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