In an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, President Donald Trump asserted that a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report for October, which was released days before the 2024 election, displayed “phenomenal numbers” to help Vice President Kamala Harris “win the election.”
“They announced these phenomenal numbers two days before the election and a little bit before that, always these great numbers,” Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen. “And then they did a revision about two weeks later, and the revision was down by almost 900,000 jobs. … And it turned out to be more than that, because later on, they did another revision, and so they gave phony numbers in order to win the election.”
On November 1, 2024, the BLS reported that the U.S. added 12,000 jobs in October 2024, the weakest monthly total since December 2020. A few weeks after the presidential election, the BLS amended its October total to 36,000 jobs, a threefold increase.
Trump’s comments on CNBC came after he fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, accusing the Biden appointee of having “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory” in a post on TruthSocial. The Friday announcement of the commissioner’s firing came just hours after the BLS released “larger than normal” revisions to its employment growth reports for May and June, which downgraded its prior projections for the two months by a combined 258,000 jobs. Trump has since called the number “RIGGED” in a separate TruthSocial post.
In August 2024, the BLS reported it had overestimated the same year’s job total for March by 818,000. It is unclear whether this figure is the “900,000” Trump referenced in his Tuesday interview.
The White House did not respond to The Dispatch Fact Check’s request for comment.
