The Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Wednesday announced an investigation into how the jobs, inflation, and other data is collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The Trump administration has used the BLS’s recent downward revision of employment data to contend that the BLS is not accurately capturing the current state of the economy.
President Donald Trump in August fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and accuser her of being politically motivated after the BLS released a subpar monthly jobs report. To replace her, Trump nominated economist E.J. Antoni, a staunch critic of the bureau’s data collection methods.
The DOL inspector general’s office said it is examining “challenges” that BLS “encounters collecting and reporting closely watched economic data.”
Laura Nicolosi, the assistant inspector general, wrote that it will initiate its review after a “large downward revision of its estimate of new jobs in the monthly Employment Situation Report.” The DOL revised its jobs data drastically down for the year end March 2025, which noted a drop of over 900,000 jobs from initial estimates.
Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carney wrote in the Breitbart Business Digest that the data revision disproves the cheerleaders of “Bidenomics:”
This follows last year’s revision, which wiped away nearly 600,000 jobs from the tally for the year ended March 2024. Two years in a row, the government’s most closely watched jobs series painted a rosier picture than reality. Two years in a row, the cheerleaders of Bidenomics assured us that any discontent was in our heads—a trick of bad vibes and social media.
It turns out the voters were right, and the official statistics were wrong.
…
What makes this more than a statistical quirk is the pattern. In February 2025, the BLS finalized a nearly 600,000-job downward revision for the year through March 2024. This September, it acknowledged another 911,000-job shortfall for the following year. Two years running, the government overstated the strength of the labor market by margins that would make a Chinese communist economic planning committee blush.
The vibecession wasn’t a psychological problem among voters or evidence that a GOP narrative had taken over the minds of the American people. Instead, it was a myth created to explain a mismatch between sentiment and statistics that was rooted in a measurement problem among government economists and statisticians.
Carney added, “If there’s a reason Trump is back in the Oval Office, this is it. Voters weren’t duped by narratives or living in a fantasy. They simply recognized reality before the statistical establishment did.”
The OIG will focus on the “challenges and related mitigating strategies for (1) collecting PPI and CPI data, and (2) collecting and reporting, including revising, monthly employment data.”
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said on Tuesday that the BLS’s negative revision “gives the American people even more reason to doubt the integrity of data being published.”
“It’s imperative for the data to remain accurate, impartial, and never altered for political gain,” DeRemer added.
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