From the White House today:

• The benchmark revisions make clear the economy President Trump inherited was even weaker than we thought. Job growth was lackluster under Biden, with initial revisions from the last two years showing job growth was overstated by roughly 1.5 million workers — showing the Biden economy was propped up by illegal immigrants, poor data, government handouts, and a flood of Federal spending. In fact, despite opening the borders to millions of illegal aliens, the Biden economy still failed to add meaningfully more jobs than President Trump did in his first term.

I reprise Figure 3 from this post on interpreting the preliminary release.

Figure 3: Nonfarm payroll employment in Preliminary benchmark revision with monthly changed “wedged in” over the 2024M03-25M03 period (red), fitted NFP using QCEW covered employment, seasonally adjusted by author using X-13 2021M03-2024M03 (light blue), fitted NFP using geometric moving average (green), all in logs 2025M01=0. Fit regression estimated 2024M03-2025M03. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, author’s calculations.

Notice that the implied trajectory for the monthly data associated with the preliminary benchmark “wedges in” equally the average monthly downward revision (911K/12 = 76K). If instead, one looked at the QCEW implied NFP (i.e., use Chow-Lin to construct the actual path of NFP), then THE SLOWDOWN IS IN THE FIRST THREE MONTHS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION.

I’m guessing that CEA did not write this memo.