It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. 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 looks 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 survey. It's a huge survey, right? This isn't like a political survey of, you know, a few hundred or a few thousand people. This is hundreds of thousands of businesses. But it's a survey, right? And so it is imperfect as an estimate. And so once a year, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, aligns those numbers with the much harder sort of real numbers, but that are less timely, that come from state unemployment agencies, right?

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