Worst Revision In History: BLS Admits A Record 911K Fewer Jobs Were Added Under Biden

Two weeks ago, before both Bloomberg and Reuters, we told our subscribers to „brace for another huge negative payrolls revision”…

Brace For Another Huge Negative Payrolls Revision, Greenlighting A 50bps September Rate Cut https://t.co/RKJXliyrVq

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 29, 2025

… and just like one year ago when we did exactly the same, we were spot on: moments ago the BLS reported that as part of its preliminary annual benchmark revisions, a record 911K payrolls for the period April 2024-March 2025 would be revised away. As shown in the chart below, the biggest revisions were in Leisure and Hospitality, Professional and Business services, and Retail and Wholesale trade sectors.

Some more from the full press release:

The preliminary estimate of the Current Employment Statistics (CES) national benchmark revision to total nonfarm employment for March 2025 is -911,000 (-0.6 percent), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The annual benchmark revisions over the last 10 years have an absolute average of 0.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. In accordance with usual practice, the final benchmark revision will be issued in February 2026 with the publication of the January 2026 Employment Situation news release.

Each year, CES employment estimates are benchmarked to comprehensive counts of employment from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). These counts are derived primarily from state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file with state workforce agencies.

The preliminary benchmark revision reflects the difference between two independently derived employment counts, each subject to their own sources of error. It serves as a preliminary measure of the total error in CES employment estimates from March 2024 to March 2025. Preliminary research, which is not comprehensive and is subject to updates in QCEW data, indicates that the primary contributors to the overestimation of employment growth are likely the result of two sources—response error and nonresponse error. First, businesses reported less employment to the QCEW than they reported to the CES survey (response error). Second, businesses who were selected for the CES survey but did not respond reported less employment to the QCEW than those businesses who did respond to the CES survey (nonresponse error). Estimates of other errors, such as the forecast error from the net birth-death model, are not available at this time. Information on how the net birth-death forecasts have reduced benchmark revisions historically are available on the CES Birth-Death Model Frequently Asked Questions page in question 10, www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesbdqa.htm.

The preliminary benchmark revisions in table 1 are calculated only for March 2025 for the major industry sectors. As is typically the case, many of the individual industry series show larger percentage revisions than the total nonfarm series, primarily because statistical sampling error is greater at more detailed levels than at an aggregated level.

What is more remarkable about today’s print is that after last year’s stunning 818K negative revision, which was the second biggest since the global financial crisis (and which we also warned ahead of time was coming), virtually nobody expected this year’s number to be higher. It was not only higher, but it was the biggest negative revision on record!

No wonder the WSJ now reports that „White House Prepares Report Critical of Statistics Agency” in what is a clear effort at kitchen-sinking all the ugly, fake jobs numbers that were „created” by the Biden admin, and saddled Trump with relentless negative revisions. Expect 1-2 more months of painful job prints, and then another powerful rally higher into the 2026 midterms under a new BLS commissioner as all of Biden’s fake baggage is expunged.

Commenting on the „data” revision, Treasury Secretary Bessent confirms what we said, namely that today’s revision „brings the Biden jobs overstatement to a staggering 1.5M. The truth: President Trump inherited a far worse economy than reported, and he’s right to say the Fed is choking off growth with high rates.”

.@kwelkernbc pushed back last week when I warned that the BLS jobs data would show a massive downward revision.

Now it’s official: 2024 job gains were exaggerated by nearly 1M workers, and this is on top of an already reported 577K in downward revisions. This brings the Biden… pic.twitter.com/Aaz0LirOxg

— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) September 9, 2025

But VP JD Vance landed the crushing blow, saying that BLS data has become completely „useless” – something we have said since 2021 – adding that a change was necessary to restore confidence. We are all eagerly awaiting said change, which will need to be far more extensive than just a replacement of the commissioner.

It’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become. A change was necessary ton restore confidence. https://t.co/RdGQcfQY8C

— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 9, 2025

So what does it all mean? Couple things and we will follow up with a more extended analysis but here is the punchline:

• Trump was absolutely correct to fire the BLS commissioner one month ago: one year of major negative revisions is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action… and in her case, it was just unexcusable incompetence as the most important economic data point the market uses was dead wrong.
• There was virtually no domestic job creation in the last year of the Biden admin when one excludes the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who entered the work force.
• The Fed should have started cutting rates in February, and would have started cutting rates in February if it knew the true sad state of the US labor market.

Just as remarkable: 2 million jobs from the last 3 years of the Biden admin have now been revised away.

One thing that will never be revised away, however, is the trillions in debt accumulated over his period, and which we now learn encumbered future generations of Americans with massive amounts of debt only to create far fewer jobs than initially reported.

And again, ZeroHedge subs knew all this two weeks ahead of time: to stay ahead of the curve, please consider subscribing.