The Heritage Foundation’s Chief Economist, EJ Antoni, called President Donald Trump’s May jobs report, 'ugly and worrisome,' in a column written for Townhall.
“The White House on Friday cited the May jobs report as evidence that the labor market's robust, while Congressional Democrats called it weak,” Antoni wrote. But the Chief Economist for the Conservative Foundation believes the May jobs report “shows the labor market is still struggling.”
“This latest jobs report has good and bad,” he said. “But there’s also something ugly—and worrisome—in the statistics.”
Breaking down the numbers, Antoni noted, “The economy added 139,000 jobs in May, but the April and March numbers were revised down heavily by a total of 95,000.”
The economist said these adjusted numbers mean “two-thirds of the payrolls added in May were jobs we thought the economy already had.”
“To be clear,” he said, “revisions are a normal part of the monthly job reports, but they became abnormal during the last administration, and nothing was done to fix the problem.”
What he believes is good about the numbers is that most of the job growth is coming from outside the federal government. “The decline in the federal workforce offset all the gains in state and local government, so that overall government payrolls are now flat since President Trump took office in January.”
Antoni added, “That means all job growth this year has been from the productive private sector—a stark change from the Biden years.” He went on to allege, “Many so-called blockbuster jobs reports under Biden were just government hiring sprees—at taxpayer expense, of course.”
Despite what conservatives call good news, Antoni still finds it “unacceptable that these data are unreliable when major market movers (including the Federal Reserve) depend on the accuracy of these figures when making consequential decisions.”
He called on the Labor Department to “address this ugly issue immediately so we can better assess if future job reports are good or bad.”
Even with the “ugly and worrisome” report, Antoni still believes the “weakness started long before the Trump administration, which is making undeniable progress re-privatizing the economy.”