U.S. created 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported

The U.S. economy made fewer job gains than initially reported between March 2023 and 2024. On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual revision said 818,000 fewer jobs had been created over the previous year — a 0.5% decrease from what the Labor Department had initially reported.

The revision comes two days before Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is expected to give a speech signaling the Fed’s inclination to reduce interest rates at its September meeting. The bank began raising rates from almost zero in March 2022 to 5.5% in March 2023, where they have remained at a 23-year high.

Many economists expect the Federal Reserve to begin cutting its benchmark interest rate next month.

The downward revision in jobs numbers comes as Vice President Kamala Harris makes job creation one of the central tenets of her presidential campaign. On the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, President Biden said he and Harris had created 16 million new jobs since taking office.

Former President Donald Trump mentioned the downwardly revised job numbers at his speech in Michigan yesterday.

“Nobody’s ever seen 600,000 to 1 million jobs less,” he said. “That’s a terrible insult to our economy because we were seeing numbers that were OK, not great, but when adjusted, they’re a disaster.”

And Trump’s surrogates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago agreed.

“This is not a unique occurrence,” Brian Hughes, senior communications adviser to the Trump campaign, at a press conference on Wednesday, adding: “There have been frequent large-scale downard adjustments to the statistics touted by Harris and [President Joe] Biden as evidence of some sort of economic recovery or new job growth.”

“It’s time to hold them accountable,” he added, accusing the administration of “inflating” the number and then “quietly” revising it downward.

But Biden administration official Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, sought to emphasize that it’s unrelated to the nation’s jobs recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The *preliminary* (it will change before it’s official) payroll benchmark revision doesn’t change the fact that this has been and remains a strong jobs recovery, powering real wage gains, solid consumer spending, and record small biz creation,” he wrote on social media.

“Important: neither the preliminary nor final revision directly affect estimates of job growth in recent months – important to keep in mind when assessing today’s labor market,” Bernstein added.