U.S. Added 911,000 Fewer Jobs in Year Through March Than Reported Earlier
407 comments
·September 9, 2025cs702
baron816
The good news is that these economic problems are entirely the result of bad policies and can be reversed.
If we were to also raise broad based taxes, it would allow the Fed to cut interest rates, stoking long term investment, loosen up the housing market (which would allow more people to move), lower the Federal deficit, and improve the trade balance (as if that actually mattered).
bobbylarrybobby
The effect of a bad policy doesn't necessarily end when the policy does. The economy has inertia so some effects, such as inflation, are self-reinforcing and need active undoing even when the policy is relaxed.
onlyrealcuzzo
Right.
Our closest allies do not see us as a reliable partner anymore.
That's not going to change for quite some time, AFTER we start moving in a direction amenable to them again.
We are still swimming violently against the currents of our allies.
baron816
Correct. We’re not reversing things anytime soon, and the longer things stay like this, the more damage will be done.
ac29
> If we were to also raise broad based taxes
Tariffs affect households unevenly [0], but I think it would be fair to characterize them as broad based taxes.
[0] Some good info here: https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-septemb...
danans
> I think it would be fair to characterize them as broad based taxes
Tariffs are broad based regressive taxes, falling predominantly on the lower deciles of the income distribution.
The OP seems to be proposing broad based progressive taxes. However the place to start first, politically speaking, is raising taxes the 10th decile.
ChuckMcM
And then we have Japan, which has spent 30+ years in the economic doldrums.
What I'm saying is that these types of systems have "inertia" and can be exceptionally long lived in their 'bad' state, regardless of the policies used to try to get them out of that state.
gscott
No they enjoyed 30 years of stable prices and relative happiness. Government pushes a fiction prices must rise so everyone works harder.
Arainach
It's much easier to destroy than build, and some things once destroyed can't be rebuilt.
Trump's inconsistent tariff and policy flip flopping means no one trusts the US to behave rationally and predictably.
The fact that the US population elected him a second time means that the US as a whole can't be trusted to behave like rational adults.
Decades or centuries of reputation has been thrown away. That can't be changed just by a new face saying "sorry we want to take it back".
ta1243
If a new face can reverse policy on a dime, then that reversal can be reversed a couple of years later.
It's amazing how few people seem to understand this. Countries are oil tankers, they take years to turn even a little - and that's a good thing. In 2000 the world broadly knew what was going to happen, Gore and BushII would implement pretty much the same policies. Same thing in 2008 when it was McCain and Obama.
Sure you get some minor tweaks to policies which don't really affect much in aggregate.
Even in 2016 Trump was unable to make massive changes, because the state is built to prevent that from happening. The US does not elect a monarch. Things take forever by design, and it's really frustrating when you want it, but it also means one person or one administration can't make a major impact, it takes a generation of pushing the overton window in the direction.
Once you break that, you have a jetski zipping around, then you can't rely on stability, it becomes riskier to invest than investing in a country with a dictator.
mensetmanusman
The media and political ecosystem that gave us an early dementia patient on one hand and trump on the other also bears blame.
jshen
I don't believe it's entirely the result of bad policies, but you also left if vague. Which bad policies are entirely causing this in your opinion?
_aavaa_
For starters we have cancelling and ripping up clean energy projects, introducing serious uncertainty about tarrifs, increasing unease for any immigrant (and even non-white citizens).
nullocator
Firing thousands of skilled and qualified federal employees, gutting research grants and funding, spitting in our allies faces.
SilverElfin
> The good news is that these economic problems are entirely the result of bad policies and can be reversed.
I think one danger for western countries is having governments that just move from one bad policy of one kind to a bad policy from the other end of the political spectrum. Look at what’s happened recently with resignations at the highest levels of government in multiple countries. And in America, if Trump gets replaced by someone who is put forth as a reaction to him, are they going to really do any good? Even if they had great policies, they’d be in danger of being undone a few years later. There isn’t the same guarantee of consistent forward progress that a country of China seems to be enjoying.
thatguy0900
The bad news is that we're only one year into the 4 years of bad policy(if we're lucky) and the policy itself will probably continue to get worse
avgDev
If democrats retake congress some things will change. Congress can stop the tariffs.
If democrats don't retake congress we are cooked. This means people are okay with whatever is happening.
baron816
Indeed. We’re not fixing it anytime soon.
nxm
We survived with 30% inflation ok key goods during the Biden years due to endless spending, we’ll survive this one too. You’re welcome to short the market though if you feel strongly otherwise
ck2
It would require admitting policies were wrong
And obeying the Constitution
And a lot of other things that are never going to happen
It will take a decade to dig out of this hole
And then there will be 11 million people "disappeared" from labor market
They are on a crime-spree, you don't do this much damage without malice
Look at what they are doing to the WhiteHouse Oval Office, Rose Garden, ballroom, look at the BILLION dollars stolen from nuclear missile maintenance for a personal jumbo jet, etc. etc.
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lucius_verus
Strictly speaking, Volcker caused two recessions (the first of which likely ended Carter's re-election prospects).
Although raising interest rates tamped down inflation on the demand side, we don't give enough credit to Carter for attacking the supply side by deregulating energy markets.
Carter typically doesn't get credit because prices didn't really ease until he was out of office. However, it looks like energy prices wouldn't have decreased if Carter hadn't deregulated the oil and gas industry, which allowed domestic producers to become competitive. (Ironically, Carter thought deregulation would raise prices and foster a move to alternative energy. Instead we got shale oil and fracking. Unintended consequences.)
hyperpape
This post is right about some things, including the general solution to staglation, and wrong about others. Paul Volker was Fed Chair between 1979 and 1987, not 1973. The 1973 crash and recession were not caused by his actions, if you had to pick a single cause, I think Opec would be it.
cs702
You're right. Fixed!
I knew that, but my puny little brain somehow didn't catch it as I was writing my comment.
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milesvp
The interest rates were wild in 1982. My dad said that no one would lend for a mortgage, and we ended up doing seller financing to buy my childhood home.
Also, not enough people talk about housing prices in high interest rate environments. Mortgage payments are the thing that tether housing prices, and act as a lever. We see it today with just an extra 4% with low housing volume and people reluctant to sell, because then they’d need a new mortgage at the new rate. People who would like to downsize don’t since their mortgage payments often ends up similar.
jghn
I remember my parents being excited about the opportunity to refinance their mortgage to something in the high teens. And now these days headlines act like the apocalypse is occurring when mortgage rates are in the 6-7 range.
esseph
Rates are lower, but housing cost is much, MUCH higher as a percentage of total income.
irq
Back during those high interest rate days, housing costs vs income were much better
dukeyukey
House prices have gone up a lot. Like a lot of a lot.
ta1243
I'd rather owe 100k over 30 years at 15% than 300k at 4%.
coldcode
I remember a friend having a 17% mortgage, which he eventually walked away from.
thisisit
Today's economy is all about politics. There are people who still hold out hope or confuse economic data with economist. Populism >>>> good policy. No one wants to be the next Volcker. So, this is likely going to stagflation. I hope I am wrong because this can be ripple effects all over the world.
sc68cal
> Today's economy is all about politics.
When has it not been? It's how we actually determine the allocation of resources
ashleyn
If inflation is lower than the rate the federal reserve hikes rates to, you can ride out stagflation in money market funds and other types of income-generating investments. The real pain is when it doesn't. Stocks decline, cash declines, and there really is nowhere to hide. TIPS? I-bonds? Both are indexed to the CPI, which policymakers have loudly signaled they are okay gaming and manipulating for political favour.
JumpCrisscross
You’re vastly underestimating the income and political effects of stagflation. Historically speaking, one doesn’t ride it out. It’s fixed fast or the system collapses.
txru
I heard Volcker speak once, you could still see him remembering how hated he was for those years of the Volcker Shock on his face. Strained and a little sad.
cs702
As he raised the federal fund rate to 20%, Volcker became widely hated indeed. Businesses and consumers suffered because of his actions.
Politicians of course tried to take control of the Fed. They also tried to fire him. At one point he needed Secret Service protection. Here's an article from the 1980's about it:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-04-05-fi-492-st...
alexqgb
I watched an interview with him several years ago. The brother was sipping from a glass of whisky on the rocks the whole time. I fully get it.
xxpor
There's a theory that changing regulation Q to uncap interest rates on savings accounts had more to do with ending stagflation than the fed funds rate hikes.
I'm not smart enough to fully evaluate if that's true, but it was an interesting theory to me at least.
logifail
Q: Hasn't the US monthly jobs figure frequently been revised downwards over recent years, regardless of which administration was in charge?
(edit - see for instance Aug 2024: https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b... )
bananalychee
It's not without precedent, but the fact that initial job numbers have been consistently inflated over the last 3 years and that the magnitude of the downwards revisions is on par with 2008-2009 for two years in a row (and growing) is concerning.
wredcoll
How exactly were they inflated?
ndiddy
The monthly employment numbers the BLS publishes are basically nonsense and I'm sure they wouldn't publish them if Congress didn't force them to. At the middle of every month, they run a survey asking ~120,000 businesses how many employees they had as of the 12th of the month. It takes 8 weeks for all the responses to the survey to come in, but the initial monthly numbers are based off of the first 2 weeks of responses. This initial data is always more representative of larger companies. The BLS then generally issues two corrections to each month's data, one when all the responses to the surveys come in and the other when they get the actual unemployment numbers from quarterly unemployment insurance tax filings.
We see large corrections in employment numbers when there's rapid changes in the job market that mess with the models, or when the changes are focused towards small companies. Right-wingers have somehow decided that all of this is instead due to the BLS somehow being out to get Trump, despite there being no significant changes to how the jobs report is made since the mid-90s.
jeffbee
The need of downward revisions is 100% due to falling and selective response rate to the early survey.
orwin
If it's like in my country, it's probably because you have more and more people "self-employed", and the average "small business" went down from 3.8 employees to 2.2 over the last 6 years (made up numbers, but i've read it almost halved which caused a lot of issues).
I think we created a new status for Uber/Deliveroo and other workers to put them out of the category three years ago and it fixed a lot of our employment data issues.
mensetmanusman
That excuse works one time. After that, you fix incentives and hire competent data gatherers.
mensetmanusman
It’s almost like the leaders of those organizations were incompetent.
Such simple statistics and data gathering should be simple for a federal organization.
spicyusername
or its almost like gathering that data is not simple...
logifail
> Such simple statistics and data gathering [...]
Simple?! "Sweet summer child..."
On a more serious note, how would one ensure that a government department be sufficiently independent that it can publish data (implicitly) critical of its own political leaders without fear of retribution?
Answers on a postcard, please...
xnx
Chart with more historical revision context: https://www.statista.com/chart/34931/difference-between-prel...
MarkusQ
That gives context, but lacks the final ~900K downward revision the article is about. If it had been shown, it would be the largest revision on the chart.
0cf8612b2e1e
Nate Silver has a previous analysis of this data
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trumps-jobs-data-denialism-wont...
The monthly revisions are historically all over the place, up and down. My 2024 count says six months were revised up and six were revised down.
botro
I think that statista chart is month to month revisions, while the 900K figure is year over year, March 2024 to March 2025.
babblingdweeb
(reposting a version of my comment somewhere below)
The BLS (USA) does adjust the numbers every month (for two months after the initial release) and annually. Regardless if the numbers go up or down, this is fairly common with statistics and forecasting in general. When actuals come in, the forecast is adjusted closer to reality.
Anecdotally: It gets lost in the mix of headlines when those adjustments show that the initial projections were on trend, or "close enough the talking heads don't care enough". However, it gets "interesting" when it's off-trend; or confirms prior notable good/bad news. In this case, it confirms* what was suspected, mostly confirms what was reported. As actuals came in, the reality was worse than projected.
*"Confirms" use case here: job growth is poop right now.
gdulli
You're right, I don't think that part is meant to be controversial.
georgeecollins
The department of labor has a methodology that gives an early number that tends to get revised. They have been doing it the same way for a long time and it would not be controversial, except the business press with too little news to report makes a big deal about it with very little context. So its, like jobs increased 200k (not saying +/- 200k is the error bar). It would be good for everyone if people who are not professional economists paid less attention to this.
triceratops
Serious question: employers presumably also use DoL numbers to decide whether to invest or cut. Could incorrect initial numbers lead to a self-fulfilling spiral?
logifail
> It would be good for everyone if people who are not professional economists paid less attention to this.
It would be good for everyone if the BLS figures were trusted.
Even "not professional economists" might lose trust in figures which are regularly revised downwards ... months after being published.
null
npalli
Not to be a Doomer but the last time I recall a revision around this magnitude was during the GFC[1].
Summary of the benchmark revisions The March 2009 benchmark level for total nonfarm employment is 131,175,000; this figure is 902,000 below the sample-based estimate for March 2009, an adjustment of -0.7 percent. Table 1 shows the total nonfarm percentage benchmark revisions for the past ten years.
Apes
People often get hyper-focused on a single cause, but there is a whole range of forces driving a sharp decline in jobs. All of this is visible, yet we are marching toward an economic crisis of our own making. I believe the best term for this is "gray rhino".
* Tariffs and Trade Uncertainty – Elevated tariffs and rapidly shifting trade policies are raising costs for manufacturers and discouraging hiring and investment (Investopedia; Atlanta Fed survey; CBO analyses).
* Automation and AI Displacement – Automation and AI, especially in low-skill occupations, are reducing new job creation and wages for some workers (academic studies in arXiv and PMC).
* Restrictive Immigration Policies – Tightened immigration and visa processes are straining labor supply, particularly in sectors that rely on immigrant workers (Axios, 2025 labor coverage).
* Small Business Strain from Economic Pressure – Tariff-related uncertainty is leading small businesses to slow hiring or lay off employees (Joint Economic Committee report, 2025).
* Offshoring and Outsourcing Trends – Technological advances are enabling offshoring and automation, substituting domestic labor with remote or machine-based alternatives (academic research in World Development, 2024).
captainregex
if anyone else is curious, beyond all the political football stuff happening with the bureau of labor stats, Odd Lots did a good episode recently on the challenges with monthly jobs reports
pnexk
Would also recommend the Moody's Talks podcast led by Mark Zandi, the Moody's Analytics chief economist. He's been more or less talking about this for months now and sounded the alarm much earlier than others about this prospect.
DavidPeiffer
Here are links to the episodes, for anyone interested.
April 2025 interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
August 2025 interview (after BLS head statistician was fired): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bill-beach-on-how-trum...
Some notes and a transcript: https://www.crisesnotes.com/bloomberg-odd-lots-podcast-trans...
udkl
What was the TLDR and main points?
kouru225
Again? So is that head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics gonna get fired again?
dpkirchner
How does this compare with the ADP figures for the same time period?
dh2022
I do not think ADP goes back and adjusts the numbers from its previous reports. I think this is because ADP does not use sampling - ADP uses the actual data from the private companies for which it provides payroll services. With this data is pretty clear, among many other things, how many people were employed at this particular company in this particular geography at this particular time. ADP then aggregates all of this data in its report.
dpkirchner
Right -- I guess I'm wondering if ADP figures were lower than BLS figures by a proportionally significant margin (enough to possibly confirm these new values). I haven't been able to find the figures myself.
lawlessone
>the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.
Can they be trusted anymore since Donald is now dictating what they say?
RC_ITR
I think it's interesting that everyone's immediate reaction now-a-days is to assume incompetence or maliciousness, rather than curiosity at the root cause (very telling this attitude has even permeated a forum for supposed 'hackers').
A high-level is that 80% of the economy is very easy to track b/c it's not very volatile (teachers, for example).
What we have seen is a huge surge in unpredictability in the most volatile 20% of jobs (mining, manufacturing, retail, etc.). The BLS can't really change their methods to catch up with this change for classic backwards compatibility and tech debt reasons.
Part of the reason 'being a quant' is so hot right now is that we truly are in weird times where volatility is much higher than most people realize across sectors of the economy (i.e. AI is changing formerly rock-solid SWE employment trends, tariffs/electricity are quickly and randomly changing domestic manufacturing profitability, etc.). This means that if you can build systems that track data better than the old official systems, you can make some decent money investing against your knowledge.
I think this is a bad state of affairs, but I don't have a good solution. Any private company won't release their data b/c it's too valuable and I am reluctant to encourage the BLS to rip up their methods when backwards compatibility is a feature worth saving.
chrisco255
Can you actually prove volatility is higher now than in the past? There have been plenty of volatile changes in the workforce over the past several decades, this is not anything new to the job market.
logifail
> interesting that everyone's immediate reaction now-a-days is to assume incompetence or maliciousness, rather than curiosity at the root cause
I came across this claim last week regarding recent US jobs figures:
> "All jobs gains were part time. Full-time jobs: -357K. Part-time jobs: +597K"
If this claim is true, and I have no means to tell if it is, then - regardless of one's view on whoever is in power right now - do we really expect any elected representatives to be brave enough to say that out loud at a press conference?
I don't :/
tonyedgecombe
Is there really more volatility? My gut feeling is that government interventions have flattened it over recent decades. I’d like to see some real figures on this.
RC_ITR
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc3z
Manufacturing and mining are becoming much less correlated to the overall jobs market (likely, as you point out, b/c the government smooths the other sectors).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc3I
This is despite being a relatively flat % of employment since 2010 (after a long period of decline).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mc4f
As mentioned, there is also the weirdness of SWE's going from 'better than the overall market' to 'worse than the overall market'.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Mcer
Retail employment is also dislocating.
Those are just the examples I can think of with no research, I'm sure there are others.
gdulli
Are 'hackers' allowed to have priors regarding incompetence or malice, or are we supposed to look at everything with a clean slate and no context?
riazrizvi
Explain to me please why job numbers aren’t simply a matter of querying the Federal social security database? A longstanding process of polling businesses for what they want to report, followed by corrections up to one year later, has got to be a pantomime to fudge the numbers.
tzs
They survey businesses because the Social Security database has too much lag and does not contain enough detail.
The lag is because it is based on employer submissions that are quarterly or annual.
riazrizvi
Does that pass the basic common sense smell test? Everyone can see on their paycheck the amount, that is paid 30 days after any work day in the worst case. These payments are sent to a single federal bank account, and data-wise are combined with Social Security ID, sending bank id, date. It’s a bank, there’s a database. We are talking at most about 200mm records, a raspberry pi can process that query in minutes. If we can’t query this easily it’s by design. Or we could do some backflips and somersaults to try to come up with a reason for why the bureaucracy has to be more complicated.
chrisco255
Probably the only reason is because the BLS and SSA are completely separate, and SSA is probably antiquated and doesn't attempt to tag or organize their data along the same parameters as whatever the BLS defines. It likely neither has the staffing nor resources to provide those hooks and realtime anonymous aggregated data for other departments to consume.
null
StillBored
Austerity has repeatably been shown to kill economic growth and trigger recessions/depressions. Yet for whatever reason there is one party in congress who's entire economic policy is basically austerity measures. Repeatedly, the ax man comes in and cuts spending that generates multiples of economic activity in return. This happens all the time cut a $1 here and it costs $4 over there kinds of things. Infrastructure is frequently in this category, delay maintenance until it can't be repaired, or simply fail to invest until a road/bridge is gridlock 18 hours a day, or the train is to scary to ride. The current admin is doing this 10x because they aren't being smart about what they cut, just doing it for political points.
Is there government waste? Sure, but that requires micro tweaks, aka instead of hiring more TSA agents maybe decide they shouldn't be randomly selecting every 3rd precheck user for additional screening/etc, or maybe decide that investing in even slower scanners isn't the right choice. Plus, in TX having seen some of these contracts the city/state gives out, the idea that private industry is more efficient is laughable. In some cases they are basically contracting out for millions of dollars a year a job that could be handled by one or two actual government employees paid less than $100k a year.
yepitwas
A lot of current conservative grousing about the deficit is priming the electorate for destroying social security. That's why they always highlight it as the main cause of the deficit, even though it has a totally separate income stream from the rest of the budget.
Republicans have done the exact opposite of balancing the budget at least since Reagan (inclusive) non-stop, zero R presidents have even done as well as democrats at pursuing a balanced budget since then, so they're not serious about it, including and perhaps especially Trump—but they really, really want to get their hands on social security, it's so much money out of the hands of rich people that they just can't stand it.
throw912
Expect this to get much worse soon. Even left-leaning youth will probably start to agree with the idea of destroying it out of spite, and even if they know it won't actually help them. At some point we'll have to admit, it's not easy to explain why youth need to subsidize things for an older generation that enjoys housing, healthcare, and stocks when they themselves have not had the disposable income for any of that. Scott Galloway has a ted-talk where he calls it generational theft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
Belopolye
The boomers ate the seed corn.
chrisco255
No party's platform is based on ending or destroying social security, especially not the GOP who gets a broad base of support from retirees. That being said, I've never had much faith in it being around for myself, though I'm 30 years from eligibility). It's possible that productivity boosts from automation and AI could overtime make SS actually sustainable in spite of overwhelming boomer population to support.
The federal tax revenue as percentage of GDP is remarkably stable regardless of widely varying income tax rates over the decades (ranging 15-20% since the 1940s): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN. This holds up no matter which regime (D or R) is dominant, because the economy reorganizes itself around incentives or disincentives created by various tax policies.
coldpie
> This happens all the time cut a $1 here and it costs $4 over there
The thing that makes these policies work, of course, is the $1 is cut from a billionaire's taxes, and the $4 is paid by the rest of us. Voters seem to like this policy, for reasons that are beyond me.
rchaud
"Austerity" lays the political groundwork for tax cuts for the rich. Austerity never affects military or police budgets though, we're happy to increase the debt to finance those.
babypuncher
Well at least the billionaire class got their massive tax cut, that's what is important. Buying food may get more difficult for the rest of us, but at least Jeff Bezos can buy another megayacht, and I'm happy for him about that.
xrd
Me too. Since he migrated his wealth from the place he earned it for thirty years to a tax haven in Florida the realities are different. With warming tropical waters, he will need to spend more money on a yacht that can handle the bigger storms. It's not a problem you or I need to worry about, but he does, and that's probably why he is a billionaire and I'm not.
whatsupdog
But also a million self-deported. So I guess it's an equilibrium.
bitsage
The revisions cover March 2024 through March 2025. While his policies may deliver turmoil in the near future, I don’t understand why most of the discussion here is about Trump. Furthermore, these revisions are at the high end of estimates, so it’s not a complete shock. The Fed and financial institutions must have already had an idea that the job market could be this bad.
Redoubts
This is the reason you should flag every political post here. The discussion quality isn’t getting any better than this
If unemployment continues to rise, and the one-time impact on prices of tariffs leads to self-reinforcing high inflation, we'll have stagflation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagflation
I sure hope not, because stagflation would be extremely unpleasant for everyone. Central banks like the Federal Reserve would be forced to raise interest rates, to put stress on businesses and consumers, so businesses find themselves unable to raise prices further and consumers find themselves unable to demand greater pay at work.
Raising rates to put stress on businesses and consumers is the only method known to work for ending self-reinforcing high inflation. It's what Paul Volcker did at the Federal Reserve in response to the stagflation that started in the early 1970's in the US and other countries, after OPEC raised oil prices. Volcker raised the federal funds rate in fits and starts to a high of 20% in 1981:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Volcker#Chairman_of_the_F...
It worked. Volcker's actions are widely credited with ending self-reinforcing high inflation. His actions also triggered a recession.
Stagflation itself triggered a stock market crash in 1973-1974. It took over 20 years, until 1993, for the US stock market to recover:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%931974_stock_market...
Like I said, it would be extremely unpleasant, for everyone. I hope we don't end up with stagflation.