> The Nazi comparisons are useful, but the Trump instinct to address negative outcomes by firing and silencing anyone on their team foolish enough to report them always makes me think of Mao and the Great Famine.
Sure why not both? But the dogma of dear leader ism & willingness to have the facts be what they say you are, to habitually step on experts & spread distrust (using a sharpie on the hurricane predictions) is something seriously enjoying huffing it's own farts.
I'm as big of a critic of Trump as you are likely to find but......the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.
Sure, you expect the numbers to change as more data comes in. But...that's a pretty big misoverestimate. This is very problematic, as it actually MASKED some of the ill effects which Trump's policies have had.
Who knows if Trump would have actually moderated his policies if he had had a more accurate read sooner, but private companies rely on this data as well, and no doubt they have made decisions they wouldn't have if they had know the true numbers.
Trump certainly was mean-spirited in trying to frame this as a partisan issue, and downright disingenuous in some of his accusations. Nevertheless, >250,000 jobs everybody thought were there but weren't....yeah, that's a firing offense.
Your point is moot becase the published data also includes confidence intervals, reflecting uncertainty in the estimation. The implications of this should be clear to anybody with high school numeracy levels.
Interestingly enough, the current 90% CI for the month is about 270k jobs:
Note that the 250k revision includes both May and June. Is that a lot? Yes, considering that the average monthly estimation error over the past 20 years was about 51k jobs:
it gives historical data for how big the revisions have been. Looks like historically, the revisions have been at least an order of magnitude or two less than 250,000. In fact to get revisions anywhere near that large, you have to go back to April of 2020. Which was when the whole world was going bananas because of COVID.
Unless I'm reading the data wrong (always a possibility) it really does seem like a 250,000 downward revision, to like 17,000, a two-order-of magnitude miss, does seem to be anomalous.
The revisions were -133k for June and -120k for May, and yes the are unusually large.
Generally, it seems that estimation post-covid became less accurate, with five (if I'm counting correctly) revisions of 100k or more since 2022, excluding the latest two.
I imagine this is because covid messed up the numbers for the seasonal adjustment.
Do note that the reported standard errors are about 83k/70k for first/second estimates (tables 3/4 at https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesvarae.htm), meaning that deviations of up to ~133k/112k in either direction from the true value are expected at a confidence of 90%.
Overall, my conclusion is that these revisions are higher than normal, but not unexpected if you dig into the numbers.
hmmm... did it get harder to estimate, or was the estimator just not up to the task? It certainly is different after COVID--did they keep updating their methodologies, or were they just relying on the same-old same-old?
sigh What do I know. My point is that probably any president would be displeased if the numbers they had been bragging about for a few quarters came in orders of magnitude worse. And any president would probably ask the question of whether the right person had the job.
Trump massively politicized the issue, in his typical very nasty and mean-spirited way. Shockingly indecorous. But we can't just reflexively attribute malice to every thing Trump does. We will lose all credibility of we overreach and overstate our case.
> did it get harder to estimate, or was the estimator just not up to the task?
It got harder to estimate, because less people reply to the survey (see sibling comment). They are aware of this and they could improve their analysis and data collection methods with more funding and staff, but have been facing challenges for years and the actions of the current administration certainly did not help:
"The government recently disbanded two outside advisory committees that used to consult on the numbers, offering suggestions on ways to improve the reliability of the government data."
March 11th, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...
> any president would be displeased if the numbers they had been bragging about for a few quarters
These numbers came with uncertainty estimates that covered the possibility of such a large revision. But this was not taken into account. Again, basic numeracy required to interpret poll results.
> But we can't just reflexively attribute malice to every thing Trump does.
Malice or incompetence I agree, which is why we dug deep and found:
1. Numbers came with uncertainty estimates that were ignored;
2. Data from the last few years was less informative than usual because fewer people respond to polls;
3. Recent cuts to budget and personnel made it even more difficult to improve data collection and analysis.
Survey response rates have decreased significantly since Covid.
"LS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic."[0]
Is that an excuse for bad numbers though? I mean, a revision of a quarter of a million jobs is abnormally large. Yes, because of COVID, etc, etc, times have changed, but if savers are not accurate enough, another method of measurement must be found.
One idea would be to scrape data off of social media sites, or just buy the data from Palantir or something. I'll bet Zuckerberg has a very accurate number of how many jobs were created last quarter.
I'm sure any president from any party would not be happy with employment numbers which were essentially useless. Trump said what he said to get BOTH left and right sides to jump to opposite conclusions. Lets not take the bate.
ADP crunches the numbers too and they were more in line with the revised estimates - there was nothing preventing companies from acting on that. How can you claim this is fireable without context about how the calculations/revisions occur and their side of the story? These trade policies are engendering so much uncertainty, combined with the shakeup in the federal workforce - honestly something like this was pretty foreseeable...
Trump has certainly politicized this firing, but it is not a firing without cause. If Trump knew a quarter ago that his tariffs were taking employment, he could have done something about it.
Instead, the read he got seemed to indicate that he wasn't hurting employment at all.
We have to be careful not to overstate our case. If we just complain indiscriminately about everything Trump does, nobody will or should take us seriously.
> If Trump knew a quarter ago that his tariffs were taking employment, he could have done something about it.
The understandable mistake is wanting to interpret the regime like it is something like a natural, healthy part of society, a rule-abiding, constructive force seeking win-wins, seeking broader support, seeking consensus. It isn't, and the failing to highlight that it is the failing of the 4th estate.
There is electorate and there is selectorate. The people in power all knew what was coming; the outrage is just circus. The people that decide over Trump do not have such things as "jobs", it is not a concern at all. Even an economic crash won't affect them.
"A new report by Goldman Sachs examining how President Donald Trump's tariffs will impact the labor market [...] found that would lead to a net negative impact on employment across the economy"
April 15th, https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/how-trumps-tariffs-could...
No, they were not able to come up with accurate numbers in the first place. If it is somebody's job to report how many jobs were created, and they can't do that with any accuracy...well...they should lose their job, under any kind of administration.
Erika Lee McEntarfer is an American labor economist with a 20 year career in government, confirmed by the Senate in a 86–8 vote.
You have to live in some alternate reality to think otherwise. Brace for the actual, very real, consequences of an economy where the numbers no longer command trust.
Survey response rates have decreased significantly since Covid, and budgets for statistical agencies have decreased.
"LS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.
Statistical agencies have also struggled with tighter budgets and staffing constraints, which have only grown more acute in the Trump administration.
“We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward."[0]
> the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.
I will try to be not too snarky, but imagine what would happen if the president announces tariffs every other day then changing it on the next, creating extreme volatility and uncertainty for investors. Imagine what would happen if the president threatens allies with war of conquest. If he causes the dollar to tumble while tanking the bond markets. If he daily threatens to blow up the last public instance in the US that employs a modicum of integrity and competence.
Imagine how high the pressure would have been in the past months to paint rosy pictures and suppress bad news all around. And yet people keep falling for the dumb narratives.
Imagine how difficult it is to do economic projections when inflation is not recorded anymore. Instead the US public get inflation data as vibes now, as things are probably expected to develop so badly that even the corporate media rooms might not be able to downplay it enough. People might get tired hearing of Biden's age.
I'm not going to argue that the Trump administration isn't a self-made cluster fork. Of course it is, on a truly epic scale.
But her job wasn't to predict the number of jobs created, her job was to measure the number of jobs created. That is something you should be able to do more accurately than a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error.
I'm as big of a critic of Trump as you are likely to find but......the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.
OH NO....a 0.15% error (total # of jobs in the US is ~163 million). Revisions of this scale are absolutely normal and have been going on as long as I've been paying attention to job/unemployment statistics. Instead of all-caps-ing absolute numbers, did you pause to ask yourself what kind of relation these revisions have to the standard deviation? I don't understand why you'd come to a site like HN that's full of data scientists and highly numerate folk and then post 'BIG NUMBER!' as sufficient justification.