October 01, 2025 02:48 PM UTC

Shutdown Bonus for Trump: No (Official) Bad Employment Numbers

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• by: Colorado Pols

The government shutdown does have at least one political benefit for President Trump: At least he won’t have to explain more terrible job numbers.

As NBC News reports, employment is heading in the wrong direction:

U.S. companies shed 32,000 jobs in September, according to the payroll processing company ADP, a surprising decline that adds to growing concerns about the rapidly weakening labor market.

ADP, which released its monthly private sector employment report Wednesday, was expected by Wall Street to report job growth of 45,000 in the month…

…ADP also revised down August’s employment growth of 54,000 to a loss of 3,000.

Those are stunning numbers when you consider that financial analysts had been hoping to see a 45,000 job increase for September. The employment number revision from ADP for August means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,000 jobs were lost in the U.S. in the past two months alone.

As Yahoo Finance reports, we likely won’t be getting any official employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for September:

A contingency plan released by the US Department of Labor on Monday noted that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would completely cease operations in a shutdown, meaning the report wouldn’t be published unless the shutdown is very short-lived.

The longer the shutdown stretches on, the bigger a deal it will be for those awaiting the data. September’s initial jobs data has already been collected and essentially just needs someone in the government to hit publish, Oxford Economics chief US economist Ryan Sweet told Yahoo Finance.

While there’s “never a good time for the government to shut down,” the current moment is especially inopportune, he said. The Federal Reserve, which cut rates in September, is closely monitoring the health of the labor market and meets again in late October.

“The Fed is always setting monetary policy in a data fog, but then it just thickens when you’re not getting the employment numbers,” Sweet said.

Much like everything else in 2025, this is good news for Trump but bad news for pretty much everyone else. The September job numbers would have been hard for Trump to spin given that he got rid of the last BLS director and can’t find a replacement. As The New York Times reported on Tuesday:

The White House has withdrawn the nomination of E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist, to serve as the leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency whose previous director was fired by President Trump after issuing an unfavorable jobs report.

A White House official confirmed the withdrawal late Tuesday, but offered no reason for the sudden change, saying only that Mr. Antoni was a “brilliant economist” and that Mr. Trump would announce a new nominee soon.

Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Antoni in August, shortly after ousting Erika McEntarfer, the previous B.L.S. commissioner, over unsubstantiated claims that the bureau had “rigged” data. Mr. Trump had seized on a report that month showing that hiring had been weaker than reported over the summer — a large but otherwise normal revision that the president nonetheless claimed as evidence of bias at the agency.

An optimist might say that this is one less person for Trump to fire, which perhaps improves the September job figures by one.

A pessimist might say that President Trump actually wants a government shutdown because then he doesn’t have to talk about topics such as Jeffrey Epstein and the Trumpcession. We wouldn’t go quite that far, but it sure is convenient timing for the Big Orange Guy.