What's the cause of the big job revision? @TheStalwart and @tracyalloway had a fantastic Odd Lots episode earlier this year with the BLS Chief on how budget cuts and survey response declines have made data collection increasingly difficult/inaccurate. The federal hiring freeze likely reduced the resources available to compile and verify administrative data from state and local governments. This could have led to an initial overestimation of payrolls (e.g., by including outdated or incomplete records), which was corrected in the revision once updated data was received. The timing of this revision (early August 2025) aligns with the end of a fiscal or reporting cycle where such corrections might be finalized. Additionally, the concurrent employment shifts from immigration policy and reporting of native-born gains, foreign-born losses could exacerbate the issue if administrative systems struggled to reclassify workers amid rapid policy changes. Not a huge deal IMO. It's difficult to get real time employment data. The BLS does a good job with its limited resources and while the more accurate revisions lag it still gets it right in the end. The big lesson is to treat monthly employment data lightly and overweight aggregated quarterly data for a better perspective.

這是我提到的 Odd Lots ep 的鏈接。