Although the Biden-Harris administration boasts of high job growth rates, newly-released government data is contradicting that claim. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, initial job growth estimates from March 2023 to March 2024 were off by nearly a million. Jobs were overestimated by 818,000, lowering the initial report’s 2.9 million jobs to only 2.1 million. The correction, published Wednesday, means that monthly job growth was not, as initially reported, 242,000 jobs per month but only 174,000 jobs per month. This marks the largest downward revision of job growth in at least 15 years.
Former President Donald Trump called the overestimation a “massive scandal,” saying on Truth Social, “The Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America.” Trump accused the administration of having “padded” job numbers. He continued, “The real Numbers are much worse than that and, if Comrade Kamala gets another four years, millions more Jobs will VANISH overnight, and Inflation will completely destroy our Country. YOUR LIFE SAVINGS WILL BE WIPED OUT.”
In a live interview on Wednesday, Biden-appointed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested that the revised numbers were fabricated by Trump. “I don’t believe it because I’ve never heard Trump say anything truthful,” Raimondo said. When an ABC News anchor informed the Secretary that the numbers came “from the Bureau of Labor,” Raimondo responded, “I’m not familiar with that.”
Appearing “Washington Watch” on Wednesday night, Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.) explained, “The Biden-Harris administration has been talking about supposedly all these jobs that are created. And in reality, what’s happened is two-thirds of the jobs that have happened over the last three and a half years were jobs that came back after the COVID shutdown.” He added, “So they really weren’t creating jobs. Labor force participation is nowhere near as high as what it was under President Trump.”
Estes noted that there have been “over and over again, repeated instances of where the facts come out that are completely different than what’s been presented, from either statements that President Biden said or Vice President Harris has said or their folks that work for them. And it’s really unfortunate.” He continued, “You can run down the litany of different cabinet agencies, even including the Department of Justice, and instances where they’ve said one thing, when in reality, the facts came out that something else was true, and that’s really a sad reflection on our government.”
“We want to make sure that whether there’s a Democrat that’s elected as the president or a Republican that’s elected as the president, the government ought to be working for all the people and not making stuff up along the way so that we have to come back in a situation like this,” Estes emphasized. “And the truth comes out and, more often than not, they try to hide it along the way. We need to make sure that the government is providing truthful information so that people can make decisions — whether their voting decisions or whether the decisions about investments…”
The revised figures will be officially incorporated into government data in April of 2025, following the publication of the final set of benchmark revisions.
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
