Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Make His BLS Overhaul Make Sense

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 05, 2025

 

“It’s a highly political situation,” the president said of the Bureau of Labor Statistics during a Tuesday morning interview with CNBC. “It’s totally rigged. Smart people know it. People with common sense know it.”

 

It isn’t just that “the numbers were rigged,” Trump insisted, leading him to sack his BLS commissioner. The bureau also “announced these phenomenal numbers before the election,” he added. The president must have assumed that no one would check his work.

 

In March 2024, the BLS revealed that, through timely and transparent revisions to its survey data, it had overestimated payroll growth over the previous year by 818,000 jobs. “Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000),” the BLS reported just four days before Election Day, “following an average monthly gain of 194,000 over the prior 12 months.” These are not “phenomenal numbers,” even if they were revised upward the following month.

 

The president and his allies have reason to be frustrated with the BLS’s survey data-gathering process. It suffers from the same structural afflictions that plague all pollsters — foremost among them, lagging response rates, which were a problem before Covid but have grown worse in the years since. There are ways to remedy that problem, or at least make an attempt. More data analysts and survey takers, changes to methodology, or simply releasing jobs reports quarterly rather than monthly, for example, might make a dent.

 

It would, however, be a mistake to conclude that the president is just engaged in the dispassionate pursuit of accurate data.

 

He admitted as much in that same CNBC interview in a clip the White House shared widely:

Ah. So the “rigged” numbers in this same report just happen to be the numbers that reflect poorly on the president. The rest of it is rock solid. What a coincidence.

 

Surely, if response rates are one of the foremost impediments — if not the foremost — to solid data collection prior to revisions, why would anyone assume that these numbers are accurate? How many employers are racing to inform the BLS that, in this political environment, they added a bunch of visa holders to their payrolls? It is at least possible that this figure will be subject to the same revisions that have led the president to dismiss the BLS commissioner, ostensibly, because of the faulty product it was putting out.

 

That is, of course, a cover story — one that is contemptuous not just of your intelligence but of your capacity for common sense.