New revisions show that first 3 months of Trump's time in office also sucked for job growth!

If you’re an econ-watcher, you had marked today as a big one in understanding the US jobs market. Because today was going to feature updated information on jobs numbers in late 2024 and early 2025, and give an early look at what total revisions to the jobs market might look like. Famously, these numbers at this time last year said that there was 821,000 fewer jobs than had previously been reported, something that Donald Trump was glad to point out, claiming the Bureau of Labor Statistics had been making the Biden Admin's record look better than it was (while ignoring that the BLS was the one reporting the lower revisions).

Well, what did we find out for this year’s prelim revisions? That the BLS had overstated job growth again, including during Trump's first 3 months in office.

The U.S. economy likely created 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated, the government said on Tuesday, suggesting that job growth was already stalling before President Donald Trump's aggressive tariffs on imports.

The preliminary annual benchmark revision estimate to the closely watched payrolls data from the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics followed on the heels of news last Friday that job growth almost stalled in August and the economy shed jobs in June for the first time in four and a half years.

The revision estimate is equivalent to 76,000 fewer jobs per month. It implied that nonfarm payroll gains averaged about 71,000 per month, instead of 147,000. Economists had expected the estimated revision to be between 400,000 and 1 million jobs.

"This means labor market momentum is being lost from an even weaker position than originally thought," said James Knightley, chief international economist at ING.

Well then!

Those topline numbers would indicate the jobs market was already maxed out in 2024, and the original reports of moderate growth of 1.76 million jobs between March 2024 and March 2025 were more than cut in half, down to 847,000, or just over 70,000 jobs a month.

Let’s look into today's release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and see what might be have caused this. And let's see if there are signs of interference and excuses from TrumpWorld to deflect from the even-worse jobs numbers that have come after March.

Each year, CES employment estimates are benchmarked to comprehensive counts of employment from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). These counts are derived primarily from state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file with state workforce agencies.

The preliminary benchmark revision reflects the difference between two independently derived employment counts, each subject to their own sources of error. It serves as a preliminary measure of the total error in CES employment estimates from March 2024 to March 2025. Preliminary research, which is not comprehensive and is subject to updates in QCEW data, indicates that the primary contributors to the overestimation of employment growth are likely the result of two sources—response error and nonresponse error. First, businesses reported less employment to the QCEW than they reported to the CES survey (response error). Second, businesses who were selected for the CES survey but did not respond reported less employment to the QCEW than those businesses who did respond to the CES survey (nonresponse error). Estimates of other errors, such as the forecast error from the net birth-death model, are not available at this time.

Ok, now that further data has made the number go down, let’s go into the QCEW database and see what the newly-released numbers for Q1 2025 have to say.

UGH! The overall 12-month increase in jobs nationwide over this time period was a paltry 675,355 (+0.44%), which isn't much different than the 53,000 jobs a month that we’ve averaged in the 5 jobs reports since then. This would make for an easy argument from Trump/GOPs that the US economy had flatlined before they came back into power, and therefore they shouldn’t be blamed for the lame results that have happened since then.

EXCEPT, take a look at the same QCEW map for the December 2023-December 2024 time period.

Look at all that blue, including 3 of the 4 Midwest states that had losses from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025 (let's hear it for GOP-dominated Iowa for being a two-time loser!). Overall, the QCEW says the US gained nearly 1.39 million jobs for all of 2024, or 0.89% - more than double the year-over-year rate of Q1 2025.

Or put another way, 12-month job growth started diving as soon as Trump got elected in November 2024, both nationwide and in our state. And then it really went down the tubes after Dimwit Donnie took office and he and the DOGE dweebs started wrecking things.

The QCEW data puts a different light on the revisions that were based on it, and means that a sizable portion of that -911,000 revision should be recorded as happening at the start of 2025. So the 3 months of 6-figure job growth that was originally reported at the start of this year likely didn’t happen.

That also means that 2025 is likely to end up being the weakest non-COVID year for US job growth since at least 2010, and bears a striking resemblance to the “declining growth” year of 2007.

Which yet again makes me think of this picture as an apt description for the US jobs market and overall economy these days.