Is The BLS Corrupt, Or Just Hopelessly Incompetent?
I & I Editorial Board
August 5, 2025
As soon as President Donald Trump announced that he was firing Erika McEntarfer from her job as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the wailing and gnashing of teeth began. This was part of an “authoritarian playbook,” it was “Orwellian,” it was “preposterous.”
The correct response is, “long overdue.”
Even for government work, the BLS has been breathtakingly bad at its job, something we’ve been reporting on this space for years.
Back in 2023, we noted that the BLS had been vastly overcounting jobs created since Joe Biden took office by as much as 77,000 a month.
In the first five months of 2024, the BLS had exaggerated monthly job growth by a cumulative total of 250,000, we noted in July of that year.
Between January 2023 and October 2024, the BLS’s monthly estimate of jobs created was off by a total of 684,000, we pointed out last November.
And these figures don’t count the “benchmark” revisions issued by the BLS, in which they go back and reset all the data for a year. In its latest revision, it cut the number of jobs created from April 2023 through October 2024 by 598,000.
Whether intended or not, these mistakes benefited Biden immensely. As we noted at the time, throughout the Biden administration, the press would tout the “big” job gains reported by the BLS each month, and ignore the huge downward revisions it issued later.
But the BLS hasn’t gotten any better since Trump took office. If anything, it’s gotten worse.
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https://issuesinsights.com/2025/08/05/is-the-bls-corrupt-or-just-hopelessly-incompetent/
