Following up from yesterday’s post, I want to clarify that I really don’t think the jobs numbers are weird right now (though what will happen in the future remains to be seen). If you look at historical data, whenever there is a period of rapid economic change, good or bad, the estimates are usually all over the place.

In the first five months of 2025, Trump has had a total downward revision of 328,000 jobs (nonfarm payroll employment). Biden, in 2021, had a single month with an upward revision of 437,000 jobs. This happens.

So I don’t DOGE broke anything or the system has been corrupted. Yet. It does remain to be seen if the numbers get altered* in the future.

*It’s not as easy to do as one might think without leaving some noticeable fingerprints (the data gathering is a highly automated system–there isn’t an army of economists typing in numbers!), but it still could happen–and, of course, Trump et alia have never been worried about subtlety.