Personally, I’m not convinced, but if you are, then consider this graph:
Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment from July release (bold black), from June release (green), civilian employment adjusted to the NFP concept, experimental research series using smoothed population controls (bold dark blue), centered 3 month moving average (light blue), all in 000’s s.a. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, and author’s calculations.
I noted this downturn in June, when the CPS series seemed to have peaked in April. Note that the CPS series is not revised month by month.
I don’t put much emphasis on the CPS employment series (from which this NFP concept series is from) because it is subject to much greater variability due to much smaller sample size. On the other hand, a trend in the CPS series is much more interesting. So, really, if Trump was disturbed (on any number of dimensions, but here on the basis of the employment numbers), he should’ve fired somebody back in June when the the CPS numbers came out showing a decline (overall employment shows the same behavior). On the other hand, there were similar downturns in 2022 and early 2024 (however, with no corresponding slowdown in NFP).
I find it somewhat ironic that the research series of CPS data adjusted to NFP concept arose in the wake of the 2002-03 recovery (recall the “jobless recovery”)when conservative economic pundits argued the establishment series was mismeasuring the jobs recovery.
A mystery was what request from the White House could be so heinously illegal that even loyal Republican Billy Long, IRS Commissioner, would refuse and be fired for it.
It seems that it was a clash between Christie Noem at DHS and Billy Long over using confidential IRS data to locate immigrants. There are very strict and very explicit laws concerning illegal disclosure of IRS data that Congress put in place to prevent just this sort of political misuse by the executive branch. And these sanctions aren’t just the typical civil slap on the wrist. There’s real criminal jail time.
It seems that Long was unwilling to risk spending his retirement years in the hoosegow. We will see if his replacement has any of the same qualms. The hot potato has been tossed to Treasury Secretary Bessent who is now the acting IRS commissioner. It will be interesting to see if he risks getting his hands burned.
Actually, it seems that it was Stephen “Himmler” Miller, directly within the White House, who was responsible for the clash with Long and not Noem. It was Miller that prompted Trump to fire Long as an impediment to his mass deportation plan.