The Biden administration claimed to have added almost 400,000 jobs from July through September of last year, but new data released this week suggest none of those jobs ever existed. Despite constantly gaslighting by the mainstream media, Americans knew the economy was in poor shape and these latest numbers prove it.
Month after month, the government bean-counters under former-president Biden published overly optimistic estimates for everything from job growth to the size of the economy, only to have those numbers routinely—and quietly—revised down later.
Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produces estimates for the number of nonfarm payrolls in the country, as well as revisions for the last two months’ estimates. Under Biden, these revisions were abnormal in magnitude and direction, being revised down with unusual frequency.
While these monthly job reports are compiled from a survey of over 600,000 businesses, of which fewer than 200,000 are surveyed each month. But the BLS also publishes much more comprehensive quarterly data called Business Employment Dynamics (BED) that come from a census of over 12 million businesses—that’s over 17 times the sample size of the monthly job reports’ survey.
This more accurate dataset was just released by the BLS for the third quarter of last year, which ran from the start of July through the end of September. In stark contrast to the monthly job reports showing an increase of 399,000 jobs during the third quarter, these new numbers show a decline of 1,000 private-sector jobs.
To be clear, the monthly job reports and the BED data do not measure exactly the same thing, and the BLS also publishes another dataset called the quarterly census of employment and wages. Each of these reports excludes certain categories of jobs or industries like railroads, government, self-employment, agriculture, etc.
That means there can be relatively small deviations between these labor-market estimates in the short run, but they trend very well together over time. In fact, the more comprehensive quarterly data are used to reevaluate the monthly job reports once a year in a process called the annual benchmark.
This benchmark adjusts 12 months of jobs data to make them as accurate as possible and always covers a period from March of one year to March in the following year. In early 2025, the BLS published the annual benchmark figures for the period from March 2023 through March 2024. The result: a staggering drop of 598,000 nonfarm payrolls.
In other words, the monthly reports had overestimated the number of jobs during those 12 months and were revised down by nearly 600,000. That’s on top of the individual monthly reports already being revised down throughout the year-long period in question.
And the downward revisions to Biden-era jobs data are set to continue. From March through June of last year, the economy supposedly added 398,000 nonfarm payrolls, according to the monthly job reports, yet the BED data show a net loss of 163,000 private-sector jobs for that period.
Instead of adding almost 800,000 jobs during the middle of last year, the economy likely shed more than 160,000 of them. The next annual benchmark will probably be a (retroactive) reduction of jobs under Biden that exceeds this year’s large downward revision.
For four years, the Biden administration and its sycophants in the media kept telling Americans that we had the strongest economy in history. The financial pain of families was ignored while misleading (and often inaccurate) statistics were paraded on the news to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes or empty wallets.
But voters weren’t fooled. That’s why they gave President Donald Trump an overwhelming victory last November, as he captured not only the electoral college, including every swing state, but the popular vote as well.
The latest economic data vindicate the American people’s judgement. No number of platitudes from government bureaucrats or deceptive headlines could fool families into believing their finances were in good shape before November.
For example, economic rhetoric couldn’t paper over the reality that credit-card debt exploded to well over $1.2 trillion from Americans being unable to make ends meet in the Biden economy. Trump was elected to fix our finances, which were much worse than Biden’s cronies would ever admit.
E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is a public finance economist, the Richard F. Aster fellow at the
Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Unleash Prosperity.