Jonathan Levin, Columnist

The Big BLS Revision Isn’t a Conspiracy

A record preliminary benchmark revision to payrolls data is not as bad as it sounds.

September 9, 2025 at 5:15 PM UTC

Jonathan Levin is a columnist focused on US markets and economics. Previously, he worked as a Bloomberg journalist in the US, Brazil and Mexico. He is a CFA charterholder.

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For the second year in a row, the esoteric process of revising labor market data is proving very popular with recession mongers and conspiracy theorists.

Released on Tuesday, the preliminary benchmark revision to payrolls data suggested 911,000 fewer jobs were created than previously thought in the year through March 2025. Investors worried that the labor market may be shakier than previously understood, while President Donald Trump’s government sought to undermine the data altogether. Vice President JD Vance said “it’s difficult to overstate how useless BLS data had become,” and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer claimed that the numbers gave American people “even more reason to doubt the integrity” of government statistics. Neither of those interpretations is quite right.