A group of Senate Republicans demanded answers from acting Labor Secretary Julie Su about the repeated revisions to the government’s jobs reports following a massive revision that saw nearly 1 million reported new jobs vanish.
Last week, the Labor Department reported that between early 2023 and early 2024 monthly job figures were overstated. The agency said the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs than previously stated, which was the biggest downward change since the financial crisis in 2009.
Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas and four other GOP senators want to know what in the Labor Department’s reporting methodology “is malfunctioning so badly that it must revise its job numbers downward by almost a million jobs?”
In a letter this week to Ms. Su, they pointed out that the massive revision comes as the Nov. 5 election moves closer and closer.
“As we approach the presidential election … the state of the economy is one of the major issues on Americans’ minds,” they wrote. “There should be no confusion when it comes to evaluating the health of our economy.”
“Regularly publishing rosy job estimates that do not represent reality is blatantly dishonest and misleads the American people, contributing to the fact that less than 25 percent of Americans trust their government to do what is right most of the time,” they wrote.
The other signatories to the letter were Sens. Rick Scott of Florida, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, Ted Budd of North Carolina and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.
The Labor Department routinely revises the jobs numbers but the recent revision was unusually large and the inflated job-creation number during a presidential election year gave some Republicans pause.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, pounced on the Labor Department’s revision, calling it a “massive scandal.”
The senators accused the agency of failing to accurately assess changes in labor participation and said the incorrect job reports led to a false veneer of economic prosperity ushered in by the Biden-Harris administration that was pushed by the media.
“These misleading numbers create a false impression for the public and cast doubt on the validity of the Bureau’s accuracy and legitimacy,” they wrote. “Had news reporters and outlets received the revised job numbers first each month, reporting and public perception of the job market may have changed.”
The massive revision to the jobs numbers also fueled concerns about an employment downturn and expectations for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates at its September meeting.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said Friday at the central bank’s annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that “the time has come for policy to adjust.”
The senators noted that Mr. Powell has claimed to be “data dependent” when making changes to monetary policy, and warned that the drastic change in the past year’s job numbers could affect plans for rate cuts.
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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