Another day, another dump of really bleak jobs data

The U.S. economy added nearly 1 million fewer jobs over the past year than initially estimated, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Tuesday, a downward revision that shows just how bleak the jobs market has become for American workers.

According to the revised numbers, the U.S. economy added just 850,000 jobs between March 2024 and March 2025—almost half as many as initially reported. 

It's unclear from the report whether more of the downward revisions took place in 2024 or 2025, after Donald Trump took office and enacted his job-killing trade agenda.

But according to BLS data, the biggest correction came in the trade industry, with wholesale trade and retail trade revised downward by more than 236,000 jobs.

This is just the latest negative economic news to drop in recent weeks. 

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On Sept. 5, the BLS reported that barely any jobs were added in August. What's more, that same monthly jobs report revised June's data to show that the economy actually lost jobs that month—the first monthly job contraction since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, the BLS reported on Sept. 3 that as of July, there were more unemployed workers than job openings—the first time that has happened since 2021, when the economy was recovering from the pandemic job crash. 

Some top economists are painting the bleak labor market as a “labor recession,” with job openings falling off a cliff. Moody's economist Mark Zandi told Business Insider that if layoffs pick up, the “labor recession” will spiral into a full-on recession.

"Everything is clinging tightly to the lip of the cliff," Zandi told Business Insider. “We had 10 fingers on the edge of the cliff a couple months ago, we now [have] seven fingers. A couple more fingers, and we're going, then we're going over the edge.”

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Ultimately, the Trump administration is using the latest awful jobs data to justify Trump's August decision to fire the BLS chief.

"It’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become. A change was necessary ton restore confidence," Vice President JD Vance wrote in a post on X.

However, economists say this is par for the course.

"This annual revision process is normal. The BLS does it every year. Last August, the BLS reported -818,000 fewer jobs. Yes, these are large (negative) revisions. Why? It’s mainly due to problems accounting for new/closed businesses since the pandemic," Navy Federal Credit Union Chief Economist Heather Long wrote in a post on X.

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