Bureaucrats’ jobs fiasco a national shame— heads must roll

President Donald Trump was right to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month — and after the fiasco that burst into public view Tuesday, he has cause to clean house at the bureau from top to bottom.

The BLS now admits that between April 2024 and March 2025, it overestimated the number of jobs created in the American economy by a mind-blowing 911,000, or nearly a million.

That’s not just a mistake. It’s a national embarrassment that calls into question everything the BLS says — and why it says what it does.

How convenient that the BLS made the economy look stronger during the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency — right on the heels of another series of blunders, when BLS overstated nearly 1.2 million jobs reported between April 2023 and March 2024.

Added together, it smacks of a political hit job: Build up Biden but tear down Trump. The president has suggested as much.

Of course, the problem could be sheer incompetence, or the bureau’s willful refusal to adjust its methods in the face of shifting data.

The BLS has known for years that its monthly workplace surveys, hit by sharply declining response rates, are woefully lacking.

This is insulting to the American people, but it’s also unsurprising: I’ve matched the bureau’s workforce against voter files and discovered that about 60% of BLS staffers are Democrats — nearly three times the number of Republicans.

A balanced agency this is not.

Did leftist bias lead the BLS to manipulate jobs numbers in favor of Democrats? It stands to reason.

But whether or not they were intentional, the bureau’s terrible errors prevented the economic policies that would have encouraged the job creation America urgently needs.

No one pays more attention to the BLS jobs numbers than the Federal Reserve, and in the last year of the Biden administration, the Fed didn’t cut interest rates in large part because the BLS said the labor market was strong.

But it wasn’t strong — it was incredibly weak, to the point that almost no net jobs were created during Biden’s final year in office.

Had the Fed known the truth, it almost certainly would have started cutting interest rates earlier this year, maybe even as early as February.

Then the jobs market would have actually picked up — and by now, the economy would be significantly stronger.

Instead, jobs haven’t grown fast enough, held back by wrongheaded Fed policies shaped by false BLS data.

The legacy media is pointing fingers at Trump for the lackluster job growth of the past few months, gleefully accusing his tariffs of killing employment.

But this ignores the massive blame that clearly belongs to the BLS. Its faulty data has stifled job growth, even as the Trump economy has delivered results in other key areas.

Real household income is already far higher in this administration’s first six months than it was in Biden’s four years, for example.

Imagine if the Fed had cut rates six months ago, as we now know the economy clearly needed: Wages would be even higher, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of new jobs that would have been created.

This economy could still boom, but only if some serious changes are made in Washington, DC.

To start, the Federal Reserve should cut interest rates this month — and by a bigger margin than usual.

The Fed has to make up for its months of inaction, based on jobs numbers that weren’t even close to accurate.

Even better, Congress should consider legislation by Sens. Rick Scott and Ted Cruz that would stop the Fed from paying massive amounts of interest on banks’ own reserves, which keeps interest rates higher than they would otherwise be. 

Then there’s the BLS. Trump has good reason to fundamentally reform this borderline-failed agency that has hurt the economy to an extraordinary degree.

He’s appointed EJ Antoni as BLS commissioner, and the Senate should confirm him as soon as possible.

The media will continue attacking the president with claims that he’s politicizing the BLS — but that ignores how politicized, or how inept, the BLS has already become.

Meanwhile, the bureau itself needs a good scrubbing.

Maybe if more unelected leftist bureaucrats lose their jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will finally learn how to count real ones.

Hayden Dublois is data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability.