From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, September 10th.

So as you know, every month, the government, federal government, releases a jobs report, right?

Numbers, Wall Street, the Federal

Reserve, and the White House all watch closely for many reasons. But 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 looked solid at the end of the Biden administration, the very beginning

of the Trump administration, was in fact much weaker.

And 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

in 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 Castleman, Chief Economics correspondent for the New York Times. Ben, welcome

back to WNIC. Hi. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So 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? So I think it's worth taking just a second on sort of what this is, right?

As you say, there are these monthly numbers that come out, you know, every month that we all pay

attention to. Those are based on a

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