“These numbers are likely to anger President Trump and the White House who incorrectly view revised data as political manipulation,” wrote Elise Gould and Ben Zipperer, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, in a post on the report.
“Trump has already lashed out at BLS, including firing the agency’s commissioner because a jobs report showed a rapidly weakening labor market. But these BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.”
The Guardian
September 10, 2025
“Any political retaliation due to today’s release will harm the ability for BLS to provide timely and unbiased statistics,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Reuters
September 10, 2025
The White House claimed that it shows that “the BLS is broken.”
It showed no such thing. As a helpful post from the Economic Policy Institute says,
These BLS data revisions are not corrections of mistakes. Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible.
As the EPI explains, monthly job numbers don’t literally track every job in America. They’re estimates based on a partial survey of employers. We only get comprehensive data from unemployment insurance tax records, which become available once a year. Revising the estimates based on that data is normal and in no sense a sign that the BLS is doing anything wrong.
Paul Krugman Substack
September 10, 2025
However, revisions even of this size “are not corrections of mistakes,” the Economic Policy Institute said in a note published on Tuesday. “Revisions are part of the regular, transparent process to update employment counts with the most comprehensive data possible,” it added.
Newsweek
September 10, 2025
“These preliminary estimates are consistent with other signs of slowing job growth in late 2024 and the beginning of 2025,” wrote economists Elise Gould and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning nonprofit think tank.
“The bulk of these revisions reflect 2024 data—in fact, despite the predictable angst they will generate from the White House, today’s revisions tell us very little about the state of Trump’s economy since he wasn’t president in 2024.”
The Hill
September 10, 2025
The lack of immigrant labor not only prevents national workers from entering the sector, but also negatively impacts these workers. Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank, explains in a recent report on employment in construction and childcare that deportations also affect national workers in several ways.
El Pais
September 9, 2025
Des Moines Register
September 9, 2025
Cuts to diversity, equity and inclusiveness programs have also affected the number of Black women in the broader workforce, said Valerie Rawlston Wilson, a labor economist and director of the Economic Policy Institute on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, noting that they are likelier to work in the DEI space within and outside the federal workforce.
Following the Trump administration’s announcement this year that it would overhaul the federal workforce, about 70,000 workers have left or have been separated from federal jobs.
“We know that Black women are about 12% of the federal workforce, which I believe is about double their share of the workforce overall, so losses in that sector you’d expect to have a larger impact on Black women,” Wilson said.
NBC News
September 9, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black women are more likely than other demographics to work for the government. Black women represent 9.7% of employed Americans, but 13.2% of federal, 15.5% of state, and 12.8% of local government employees.
Forbes
September 9, 2025
Features interview with Valerie Wilson.
NBC News
September 9, 2025