[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As you know, every month, the federal government releases a jobs report, right? Numbers. Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and the White House all watch closely for many reasons. This week, we learned those numbers have been way, way off. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual revision, when they do once a year, found the economy added 911,000 fewer jobs in the year ending in March than first reported.

That means growth that looks solid at the end of the Biden administration. The very beginning of the Trump administration was, in fact, much weaker. The news arrives just weeks after President Trump famously fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It covers, as I say, the final stretch of the Biden administration and the first months of Trump's second term.

It also comes at a moment when hiring has slowed in the present, unemployment has ticked up, and even the reliability of the numbers themselves is becoming a political issue, right? There are concerns Trump will politicize the numbers so much as to make them meaningless. He has also floated the idea of ending the monthly jobs report, and we'll talk about that, among other things, with our guest, Ben Casselman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times. Ben, welcome back to WNYC. Hi.

Ben Casselman: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly, because I want to get to underlying issues, this 911,000 fewer jobs revision in the year ending in March. How unusual is that?

Ben Casselman: I think it's worth taking just a second on what this is. As you say, there are these monthly numbers that come out every month that we all pay attention to. Those are based on a survey. It's a huge survey. This isn't like a political survey of a few hundred or a few thousand people. This is hundreds of thousands of businesses, but it's a survey, right? It is imperfect as an estimate.

Once a year, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, aligns those numbers with the much harder real numbers, but that are less timely that come from state unemployment agencies. As The New York Times files every month says, "Ben is working here," WNYC says, "Brian is working there." Those are the hard numbers, and they align those. This year, that shows that we added close to a million fewer jobs in the year through March than we thought.

That's a big number. It's important to keep some context there. There are 160 million jobs in this country. On one level, a million is not that big, but it's a huge percentage of the jobs that we thought we had added over this period. It is an unusually large revision. We had another big one last year, and we can talk maybe more about that. These two years of big negative revisions have raised some eyebrows about how well we're doing at measuring the economy.

Brian Lehrer: Why are we not doing better than we are?

Ben Casselman: [laughs] I'd say there are two main reasons for this. One is it's always difficult to measure an economy during periods of rapid change. I don't need to tell you. This has been quite a period of rapid change, going back to the pandemic and everything that came after that. Then, of course, more recently with everything that's been happening with the administration, it's tough to keep tabs on that in real-time. We expect there to be larger revisions during that period.

We also are having an increasingly difficult time measuring the economy because people are responding less to surveys. That's true of both households and businesses because the economy is changing quickly. Some of the measures we used to use maybe don't apply as well and, crucially, because the budget of the statistical agencies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, some others, have been shrinking or not keeping up with inflation. That's making it more difficult for them to make the adjustments that they need to make in order to do a good job of measuring the economy.

Brian Lehrer: You have in your article that administration officials have argued that new leadership is required to push the agency to modernize its approach to data collection, including by relying less on surveys. Experts on the statistical system from both political parties say those criticisms are mostly unfair and point to what you were just referring to, budgets that have declined for the Bureau of Labor Statistics under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Ben Casselman: Yes, if you talk to folks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics now or before the recent controversy, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that, they've said all along we need to adapt, we need to rely less on surveys, we need to modernize the way we do things. They have been doing a lot of modernization. They're using more private-sector data, more "big data" to try to measure things, but those efforts have been stymied by these reduced budgets. They've got to keep producing all the old numbers as accurately as possible while they try to figure out how to collect numbers in a new way. That requires resources, and they really haven't had those resources.

Brian Lehrer: On the politics of Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming she was biased, meaning she was trying to make him look bad. The new monthly jobs report, the one that came out last Friday for August, showed just 22,000 jobs added. That was way worse than the previous month when she was in charge. Unemployment at its highest in nearly four years. Can we say, or can we not say, that the August job numbers after Erika McEntarfer was fired by Trump reflect people Trump wants to see doing the counting, and it neutralizes his whole attack?

Ben Casselman: Yes, so I think we should [unintelligible 00:06:22] here. First of all, there's just absolutely no evidence for this idea that the numbers were biased against him under Erika McEntarfer. In fact, there's all the evidence in the world that that was not the case. They produced bad numbers for Biden for much of his term. They produced good numbers early in Trump's term. There's just no evidence of bias there.

I don't think it's right to say that his people are in charge there now. He has nominated a conservative economist, E.J. Antoni, whose nomination has been widely criticized, but he's not in charge yet. He hasn't been confirmed by the Senate. In the meantime, the BLS is being run by a longtime civil servant there, Bill Wiatrowski. He was the acting commissioner before Dr. McEntarfer took over.

He's the acting commissioner now. It's really the same people doing the same work using the same methods. I think we should trust the numbers that are coming out now in the same way that we trusted the numbers that were coming out before, which is to say with a grain of salt because of all these issues, but certainly with no reason to think that they're politically biased.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks in a text, "I understand why data from the past few months gets revised, but year-old data with a huge revision?" You want to answer that listener's question even more than you have?

Ben Casselman: Yes, it's a great question. We get these near-term revisions, these month-by-month revisions just as new data comes in, but that data is still this survey data. It's just some of the businesses responding a little bit late. These big annual revisions, what they do is they basically say, "Forget the surveys. Now, we have the real numbers. Now, we have the hard data from state unemployment offices that actually tell us pretty close to the real answer of how many people are working in this economy." There's always this trade-off here between timeliness and accuracy. We want the numbers now so that we can make decisions, but we can't get the full, most accurate numbers now. What they do is they give us the best estimate they can in real time, and then they revise those numbers when we get the full information later.

Brian Lehrer: Just to talk about these big annual downward revisions in a little more detail for a minute, I see that they hit hardest sectors, including hospitality, retail, and information. These are industries that employ millions of workers. What does that breakdown tell us about where the job market is losing steam?

Ben Casselman: I think it's interesting to see that this is both in some of the service sector, consumer-facing-type businesses, retailers, leisure, and hospitality. Those are some of the areas that are obviously sensitive to consumer spending. Then also in information, which is the media industry, which is the tech industry, these are industries that have been going through huge shifts with the rise of AI. I don't think we want to overinterpret what these specific revisions could mean. We certainly do see evidence in this economy broadly that both there is pressure on the consumer side, and then there are also these sorts of long-term shifts that are having a real issue on people who are trying to get professional jobs.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anybody want to help us report this story with a very unscientific survey of what's going on in your business or your sector of the economy with respect to hiring or laying people off? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone with a question about labor statistics and what they mean for Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, call or text, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. How about that Trump idea? I don't know if he's going to actually try to implement it, but at least floated it, of not relying on the monthly job, not even having a monthly jobs report, but doing it less frequently. Is there an accuracy reason for that? Do you also see a political reason that he would want that?

Ben Casselman: Yes, and I think this is something that's been floated by E.J. Antoni, who's Trump's nominee to run the BLS. I'm not sure that Trump himself has talked much about that. Look, I think that anybody who spends time watching these numbers will tell you that it makes a lot of sense not to read too much into any one month of numbers. You'll hear people like me and economists say this all the time.

It makes sense to look at a moving average of three months or even six months. It makes sense to look at a bunch of different indicators and put them together. In that sense, the idea of saying, "Don't overemphasize one month," or "Think about this on a more quarterly basis," I think has the merit to it. The idea of eliminating the monthly jobs report entirely, I think, is one that would get just a tremendous backlash from the Fed, from the business community, from investors, because they need more real-time data.

My inbox is flooded with private sector data providers saying, "We can give you information that is even more up to date than the BLS numbers," with mixed results, I should say. There's a desire for the most up-to-date, the most timely numbers. The idea that the government would just say, "Never mind. Let's go back, and we'll start doing quarterly or annual or what have you," I just think, isn't going to hold water.

Brian Lehrer: I think we're going to get a report from somebody on the front lines. Joanne in Newton, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joanne.

Joanne: Hello. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What you got?

Joanne: In regards to jobs slowing down or cutting hours or just straight up letting people go, I work at a butcher shop in northern New Jersey in Sussex County. Everybody's hours got cut, including my own. Even as a manager, my hours have been cut. There's obviously a lot of reasons why that's happening in my current little part of the world. The main one is truly that, right now, it's balancing not only the cost of the product to bring in, but the amount of hours in labor that is needed.

It just seems like people are buying less stuff. I'm a little bit worried I might end up having more of my hours cut or just straight up letting most of my staff go, which requires then me to pick up that slack. It just seems like a very tumultuous time. As a late 20s person, I'm a little bit nervous about my own path going forward in the labor economy. Yes, I'm very nervous right now, especially considering that these job numbers are not looking very great.

Brian Lehrer: In your circles from your employer or anyone else, are they chalking any of this up to tariffs?

Joanne: Yes. I work at a butcher shop, so a lot of our product is US-based. Obviously, most of the items that we use for packaging and the cardboard, and many other products are being shipped from overseas. Most of our products, specifically plastic products, have gone up in cost quite a lot. A lot of our distributors are trying to work with us on those costs and eat some of those tariffs. We have seen a large jump in the cost of most of our packaging supplies.

Of course, now, beef has gone up in price as well because of the corn tariff. There's a lot of people who are not buying corn, so farmers are lowering the amount that they are going to grow in the future. Beef eats corn, so there's so much that's going on, and it just reminds you that everything is so intertwined in a global economy. It's getting a little nerve-wracking for sure.

Brian Lehrer: Joanne, thank you so much for chiming in. A very informed meat department manager there. Ben, are you hearing stories that would make her representative of a lot of what's going on?

Ben Casselman: Yes, Joanne, you should go into economics or business if you decide to leave the meat industry. No, look, I think a lot of what the caller is describing resonates with what we're seeing in the data here. We're in this interesting moment where businesses are hiring a lot less. They may be cutting back hours. They are, for the most part, not laying a lot of people off. There are obviously exceptions to that.

We're seeing businesses that are trying to hold on to the workers that they have. Maybe because they were scarred by that experience of trying to staff up, coming out of the pandemic, and struggling. They finally got their workers in. They don't want to just get rid of all of them. We're at this pause point in the economy where, if you're looking for a job, it's a really difficult time to find one.

If you have a job, you maybe aren't losing it, but you're maybe worried about your hours. You're maybe a little nervous about what happens there. I do think that there's that tension, and we don't quite know which way that breaks yet. Do businesses eventually say, "Seems like things are okay. We can start to hire again," or do they actually start needing to make some of the cuts?

Brian Lehrer: Kyle in Chinatown with another report from the job-hunting front. Kyle, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Kyle: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my call, Brian. I used to be in the service industry before 2020, then I got into the IT industry after that. The last five years or so, I've been doing IT for restaurants. It's a marriage of both worlds, but I was let go. Our restaurant group got rid of the IT department at the beginning of the year, the first quarter. I'm not really sure if they did that because of the economy.

I wasn't even going to call until I heard the jobs report on IT and hospitality being in there. I've been looking for jobs since. My unemployment insurance just ran out two weeks ago, so it's rough out here even for both. I've been going to service job interviews and IT interviews. I've been getting more action on the IT résumé, so I'm focusing on that. If you've got a job, hang on to it because it's rough.

Brian Lehrer: Good luck out there, Kyle. Thank you for filling us in. Bad as that news has been for you. To the point of both of our callers and the larger picture that you've been reporting on, Ben, as chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, some economists are warning about what they call stagflation, weak growth, and rising prices at the same time.

As the Fed looks at this and decides on interest rates, that must be a big tension. Because if the job market is weakening, well, the Fed typically lowers interest rates to help give employers reasons to invest and hire more people. If there's inflation, they usually raise interest rates to cool the economy a little bit and the growth of prices. If both are happening at the same time, where does that leave Jerome Powell and company?

Ben Casselman: Yes, it's a really tricky position for them to be in. This is the worst-case scenario for the Fed. Of course, it's a worst-case scenario for Americans, right? You don't want to be in a place where you're both looking for work and you're paying higher prices, particularly for food and other essentials. I will say that evidence that we've been seeing over the last few weeks is more on the stag side than the flation side, that we're seeing price increases for certain products. We're seeing some evidence of tariffs flowing through to some imported goods.

For the most part, we haven't seen this big explosion in inflation. Instead, what we're seeing is softness in the economy, slower hiring companies, in some cases, not passing on those cost increases, perhaps because they don't think that customers are going to be willing or able to pay it, because of that nervousness about the economy. I think what we're seeing, at least so far, is more evidence that the economy is slowing than that inflation is picking back up, which is a big part of why I think most people are expecting the Fed to cut interest rates next week, although certainly not as much as President Trump would like them to.

Brian Lehrer: Although we don't know how much tariffs are going to cause inflation eventually.

Ben Casselman: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned a lot of businesses holding back so far and passing on the increases that they're seeing. Friend of mine showed me a text or an email that they got recently from a business that they buy things from online. This very apologetic email or text, I'm not sure which it was, to their customer list that said, basically, "We've been eating the costs of the tariffs so far, but we just can't afford to do it anymore. Therefore, we are raising our prices 15%." I wonder if that's a little bit of a leading indicator of many more like that that we're about to see.

Ben Casselman: My local coffee shop, where I go every morning, had held off on price increases for a long time, and then they just finally pushed through a big one. I think that that's right. I think that there's a simplistic way of looking at this that sometimes we maybe hear from economists, right? They just do the math, and they say, "This tariff hits, and it's going to play out in this way and lead to this percent increase in prices," as if that's going to all happen overnight. That's not the way it really happens, right?

Businesses are reluctant to raise price because they're nervous about losing customers. They try to negotiate with their suppliers. They try to hold off as long as they can. Then at some point, there's a breaking point and they say, "I've got to pass this along." In some ways, what we may see is less of an immediate impact than we had been anticipating, but therefore, for it to last longer and, in some ways, be even more insidious as that creeps into the economy.

Brian Lehrer: Paul in Manhattan, one more caller for Ben Casselman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times. Hi, Paul. You're on WNYC.

Paul: Hi, guys. Nice to be here. This past year, my wife had worked for a white-collar company for 25 years. She was basically replaced by AI. She was an IT trainer, and she was let go after many, many years. Basically, we had found out through the grapevine that she was replaced by AI. I was just wondering that we talk about the jobs report and that kind of stuff. Are we ever, in the future, going to see AI replacements and that number and--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, broken out. Paul, let me leave it there because we're running out of time in the segment, but it's a great question. Do they break out jobs replaced by AI, or can you report on that in any other way as a journalist?

Ben Casselman: Yes, it's a great question. They don't break it out directly. We are starting to see some hints around the edges that there's some of this happening. We're seeing recent college grads have been having a hard time getting jobs, particularly in some of the areas where we might expect there to be AI impact. We're seeing this in some of the types of jobs like the caller is talking about.

It's tricky because we're also in the middle of a slowing economy. Who are the people who have a hard time getting jobs in a slowing economy? Recent grads, right? How much of this is AI? How much of this is a slowing economy? How much is other things? It's hard to tease out in real-time. It's something will become clearer over the longer run. I think there's no question that AI is having an impact in the job market.

Brian Lehrer: Can I get one very quick take? We should probably do a separate segment on this. On a different time story, your colleague, Jesse Drucker, reported that the Trump administration is halting the IRS's crackdown on corporations' tax shelters. I'm going to say that again. The Trump administration is halting the IRS's crackdown on corporate tax shelters. One snarky report I saw on this said, "Oh, Trump is defunding the police." How does that decision fit into the broader picture of the administration's approach to revenue for the federal government? Give me a 30-second sound bite on this. We'll follow up on another day.

Ben Casselman: Yes, it's definitely a topic for a whole episode. Look, we're in a fiscal crunch. The deficits have been growing. The Biden administration's approach to that in part was, how do we raise money without raising taxes? Let's enforce the laws that we already have on the books. The Trump administration is pulling back from that. They're, of course, imposing tariffs as another source of revenue. Ultimately, we're replacing taxes that are mostly hitting the wealthy and corporations with tariffs that are going to hit harder at the lower end of the earnings spectrum. I'll let your listeners read into that what they will, but that's the facts of what's happening.

Brian Lehrer: Ben Casselman, chief economics correspondent for The New York Times, very informative. Thanks for this.

Ben Casselman: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.