Fox News is now suggesting that President Donald Trump’s poor job report figures are the result of bad math and a stagnant economy left by his predecessor.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised figures on Tuesday, which determined that the U.S. economy added 911,000 fewer jobs between April 2024 and March 2025 than previously reported—the most significant revision in the bureau’s history.
Fox Business reporter Edward Lawrence noted the majority of that timeframe was during the presidency of Joe Biden. He said such a revision, which essentially cut the period’s growth in half, called into question the methods used by the BLS to calculate job growth and losses—something since echoed by Vice President JD Vance.
“Some people who watch this report closely say that the revisions last year of 818,000 (sic) is a reason to change the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at data,” he said.
Fox News aired a segment from its business network’s Mornings With Maria, during which Mendon Capital Adviser CIO Anton Schutz said that the regularity of the BLS’ significant revisions is evidence that it is past due to switch up its procedures.
“Obviously, we’re not collecting the data the right way, and we haven’t been for quite some time,” he said. “We’ve got to look at trying to get that to be more accurate... There’s no doubt about it, we’ve not done it right in a long, long time.”
Unhappy with figures that showed the economy stagnating, Trump fired statistics chief Erika McEntarfer, 52, in August and baselessly accused her of politically manipulating figures. However, since her firing, American job statistics have only worsened.
Even with McEntarfer gone—and Tuesday’s revision showing the U.S. economy was not as “hot” as MAGA trumpeted in the early days of MAGA 2.0—the administration has continued its attacks on the BLS.
“It’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become,” Vance posted on X, referring to McEntarfer’s firing. “A change was necessary to restore confidence.”
The bureau, now under the leadership of a Trump appointee, E.J. Antoni, 37, has not released numbers favorable to Trump since being hired. It said the country added just 22,000 jobs last month—well below expectations, with the only positive sector being healthcare and social services. The unemployment rate also rose to its highest level since 2021, at 4.3 percent.
Citing the New York Federal Reserve survey of consumer expectations, Lawrence said Americans are more worried about keeping their jobs than ever before.
“The expectation probability of finding a new job if someone loses their job dramatically fell 5.8 percent last month to the lowest level since they started keeping the statistics,” he said, noting that just under half of the country believes that they could not find a new gig if they abruptly lost their current employment.
Lawrence said “some” market experts are suggesting that Tuesday’s revision means the U.S. economy was already on the decline in the latter half of Biden’s presidency.
“Some market experts are saying that if this number was close to a million jobs, which it was, then that means the job market had already stalled at the end of the Biden administration, before President Trump even took office,” he said.
