Friday jobs report is unlikely to show the gawdawful economic and human damage the Trump-Musk junta is causing

For 85 years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued a detailed monthly report on the nation’s job situation. The latest edition will appear Friday morning amid growing reports of economic disaster in the offing. 

If it’s a good report, you can expect our Outlaw Prez to praise it and himself for making it happen. If it’s not, you can expect him to say something along the lines he’s been hewing to since the 2016 presidential campaign, namely that numbers from the BLS and the Bureau of Economic Analysis during President Obama’s terms of office were “phony” and “totally fiction.” However, with Obama’s presidency in the rear-view mirror, a good jobs report came out in March 2017, and Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer said to reporters’ laughs at a White House briefing that the new president wanted everyone to know the unemployment rate “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” 

Trump didn’t stop when Joe Biden became president. There’s zero reason to believe he will behave any differently this time around. If a report is strong on his watch, it’s all because he’s brilliant, while a weak report will be labeled a product of deep-state actors manipulating the numbers. Just as he also views favorable reports published with a Democrat in office a result of deep-state actors manipulating the numbers. 

For instance, when last month’s jobs report was issued, the annual revision showed 818,000 fewer jobs created in the previous 12 months than had previously been reported,” Trump went into concoction mode. He asserted the Biden administration had thought this downward revision could be concealed until after the election, “but there was a whistleblower, and the whistleblower couldn’t stand what they were doing, and blew the whistle on them, and they got caught.” As Daniel Dale at CNN reported:

This is fiction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly releases the preliminary revised data in August, and it had disclosed the precise date of this particular data release — August 21 — weeks in advance.

William Beach, a conservative economist who was appointed by Trump to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote on social media: “For those who think the big revision to the BLS jobs numbers ‘leaked’ and was meant to come out after the election, remember that BLS always announces its draft revisions in August and announced this year’s date, August 21, many months ago. It is important to check your facts.”

“Fiction” has such a softening effect over, say, “fabrication” or just plain, old “lies.” But I digress. 

Beach left the bureau two years ago, and last January the Senate confirmed President Biden’s replacement—Erika McEntarfer. Six weeks into Trump 2.0, she’s still in that post. 

With DOGE axing jobs willy-nilly across multiple federal agencies, some people may be expecting BLS stats this week to reflect the damage. But that’s unlikely.

First, the surveys the BLS relies on to compile its jobs reports are completed on or close to the 12th of each month. This means the latest report will only cover half of January and half of February, and Trump didn’t announce mass layoffs until Valentine’s Day. Moreover, even if the administration somehow beats the courts — one of which has already called layoffs of probationary employees illegal — a successful 10% slash of federal employees would mean about 200,000 would lose their jobs. Obviously disastrous for many of them and harmful to agencies’ missions and morale, but only a blip among the tens of millions of workers across the economy. 

For instance, Betsy Stevenson, a labor economist now at the University of Michigan, told CNBC: “First of all, we obviously won’t see [big federal job losses] in the next employment report because these layoffs happened, very smartly, right after the reference week. That’s a very clever way to try to keep these things out of those monthly reports we see, because as long as people find a job before the next month’s reference week — before the week of March 12, that contains the 12th — they won’t show up at all.” 

She noted that most of the millions of people who leave their jobs each month aren’t “losing” them. They’re quitting and they have a plan for what’s next. “But I think a lot of these federal workers were absolutely blindsided, and that’s going to change their behavior. I also think that there is a chill in the air about who might lose their job next, and that can start to reduce spending. In fact, I would recommend to my friends, ‘cut your spending now, build your nest egg, we don’t know what’s going to happen, there’s a lot of uncertainty.’ Whenever you’re in an economy where a lot of people feel they need to build their nest egg, cut  back their spending, you start to see the economy slow.”

With giant budget cuts and economy-shredding tariffs now in play, a mere slowing would be a blessing compared to what’s likely coming. Ever more economists are looking with alarm at near-term prospects. Carnage might be too mild a word to describe what the March and April job reports will look like.

One barometer of where we’re headed comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow, a forecasting model. While the official growth rate of inflation-adjusted gross domestic product is released with a delay, the GDP model provides a “nowcast.” This, as the Atlanta Fed notes “is best viewed as a running estimate of real GDP growth based on available economic data for the current measured quarter. There are no subjective adjustments made to GDPNow—the estimate is based solely on the mathematical results of the model.”

Currently, that’s an astonishing -2.8%, and the trajectory as shown below is not soothing. When GPDNow updates on Thursday, you can count on its being worse.

GDP is a flawed measurement for which various experts — like Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz — have failed to find a good alternative. But for now, it’s the most comprehensive gauge we have, and if the GDPNow model turns out to be even half accurate, the jobs reports after this week’s will be as horrible as the administration whose wrecking ball economic policies have just gotten rolling.