Rick Scott questions job creation numbers after downward revisions

Florida’s junior Senator is joining with Republican colleagues in an effort to get answers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) about jobs numbers that were lower than they were originally reported.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott joined U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Ted Budd, Roger Marshall and Markwayne Mullin in a letter to Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su in an attempt to figure out why the Joe Biden administration “has failed to accurately assess changes in labor participation.”

“For example, in recent months, the American people have witnessed a monthly 97,000 downward revision for January 2024, a 300,000 total downward revision as part of the BLS’s annual 2023 benchmark review, and, most recently, an 818,000 total downward revision for jobs created in the 12-month period through March 2024. This revision to the 2024 benchmark review is 28 percent lower than the original BLS estimate of 2.9 million jobs created,” the GOP Senators remark.

While even conservatives acknowledge that the BLS revises projections regularly — including under the Donald Trump administration, which reduced its original benchmark by 501,000 jobs in 2019 — the Senators suggest a particular perniciousness to the effort from the White House, as well as its allies in the press corps.

“These discrepancies, representing jobs that the Biden-(Kamala) Harris Administration claimed to have created, which simply do not exist, were reported as signs of economic dynamism and positive job creation. There were multiple instances over the last year in which news outlets reported that the job market was ‘strong,’ ‘red-hot,’ or ‘sizzling,’ to name a few. News outlets took initial BLS data at face value, concluding that the job market was strong.”

The Republicans argue that the “misleading numbers create a false impression for the public and cast doubt on the validity of the Bureau’s accuracy and legitimacy.”

“Had news reporters and outlets received the revised job numbers first each month, reporting and public perception of the job market may have changed. Given the woeful record of the Bureau over the last two years, it is time for the BLS to accurately assess labor participation at the outset and admit the fact that the number of full-time employed Americans decreased by 510,000 from July 2023 to July 2024.”