Effective September 30th, some 105000 Federal workers who had signed up for the Deferred Resignation Program will be officially unemployed. The usual reference (correction per Ben Zipperer) period for counting employment, either in the CES or the CPS, is in the week including the 12th of the month — that is, this week; <I>the week for interviewing is the week including the 19th</I> (correction).  If you think there’s only going to be a mild increase in private employment in October, coming after that in September (-17K from ADP, -77 to BLS from my nowcast), then the 100K drop will look meaningfully “bad”.

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment implied from preliminary benchmark (bold black), Goldman Sachs (light blue square), Bloomberg consensus (tan triangle), Carlysle (green *), and ADP implied private NFP plus August government employment (inverted teal triangle), all in 000’s, s.a. ADP implied private NFP estimated using regression, described here, plus government employment levels for August. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, WSJ, author’s calculations.