Ninety percent of the jobs America was told it gained in 2025 didn't survive the government's own recount.
Every month, the government puts out a jobs report. Add up 2025's reports as they were first announced, month by month, and the country gained about 1.21 million jobs in the first year of Trump's second term. That is the math economic commentator Steve Rattner did this week, using the government's own archive of every jobs report as it was first released.
Now here is what the government says today, after it went back and checked its work. From December 2024 to December 2025, the country added 116,000 jobs.
That is about 90% less than first reported. Spread across twelve months, it is fewer than 10,000 jobs a month.
Why the numbers change
The first jobs report each month is an early estimate. It comes from a survey of employers, and plenty of them answer late. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the agency that counts American jobs — keeps updating each month's number as more answers come in.
Once a year it does a bigger check. It lines its survey up against state unemployment-insurance tax records, which nearly every employer has to file. Those records are close to a full head count, so they show how far off the survey was.
For 2025, the answer was: a long way. When that yearly check came out on February 11, 2026, it cut 2025 from an estimated 584,000 jobs to just 181,000. Updates since then have pushed it lower still, to the 116,000 the government reports today.
None of this is a scandal at the bureau. Revisions are how the count gets more accurate. The scandal is what the president did the last time a revision told him something he didn't want to hear.
The last time the numbers went bad, Trump fired the messenger
On August 1, 2025, the bureau reported weak job growth for July and revised the two months before it down by a combined 258,000. Trump fired the bureau's head, Erika McEntarfer, that same day, and accused her without evidence of rigging the count:
"I was just informed that our Country's 'Jobs Numbers' are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala's chances of Victory."
William Beach, the man Trump himself picked to run the bureau in his first term, called it "the totally groundless firing" of his successor. Trump then tried to put E.J. Antoni, an economist from the Heritage Foundation, in the job — a nomination withdrawn at the end of September 2025. We laid out the whole episode in our look at eighty years of job growth under every president.
Look at Rattner's chart above. The year Trump said was faked to help Kamala Harris, 2024, did get revised down — from 2.59 million jobs as first reported to 1.46 million, a 44% cut. That is a big miss. But it still left the country with more than a million new jobs.
2025, Trump's own year, was revised down 90%. And it left the country with 116,000.
Trump bragged about the numbers that didn't hold up
On the night of January 8, 2026, the day before the December report came out, Trump posted a chart on Truth Social showing the economy had added 654,000 private-sector jobs since January while shedding 181,000 government jobs. Put those together and his own chart claimed a net gain of 473,000 jobs. The government's count for the whole year is now 116,000 — about a quarter of what Trump was showing off.
A month later, on the very day the February check wiped out most of 2025's gains, the White House was taking a victory lap over the new January number. Deputy press secretary Kush Desai called it a "blockbuster, expectation-shattering jobs report" that "proves that President Trump's economic agenda continues to pay off."
That is the pattern. A strong first estimate gets a press release. The correction, months later, gets a shrug — or, if it lands at the wrong moment, a firing.
The same chart shows the early reports for 2026 have been closer to the mark so far. Through September, they added up to about 730,000 jobs; the current count for January through September is 612,000, 16% lower. Those months will be checked again next February.
What a nearly flat year means
A nearly flat year comes on top of what else working people are facing. Workers' share of everything the economy produces just fell to its lowest level since the government began measuring it in 1947, while corporate profits kept climbing. One Indiana Republican wrote an op-ed titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing" — and the state then lost 9,148 factory jobs.
What the numbers show
As first announced, 2025's monthly jobs reports added up to about 1.21 million new jobs. After the government finished checking its work, the year added 116,000 — about 90% less, and fewer than 10,000 a month. Trump bragged about the early numbers in January 2026, posting a chart that showed a net gain of 473,000 jobs. When a far smaller downward revision, 258,000 jobs, came out in August 2025, Trump fired the head of the agency that counts the jobs and accused her, without evidence, of faking them.
Source
Steve Rattner on X, October 22, 2026: "When first reported, 2025's jobs reports added up to 1.2 million new jobs. After revisions, the economy added just 116,000 — 90% less."
