Biden calls out Rubio for false claim that solid jobs report is ‘fake’

President Joe Biden on Friday rejected Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s claim that the robust jobs report was “fake” as he heralded the latest positive economic news for his administration.

In a surprise appearance in the White House Briefing Room, Biden welcomed the jobs report and the deal to end the dockworkers strike before taking several questions from reporters. He was asked about Rubio’s comments.

“I’m going to be very careful here. If you notice, anything that MAGA Republicans don’t like, they call fake,” Biden said. “The jobs numbers are what the jobs numbers are. They’re real.”

Earlier Friday, Rubio (Fla.) suggested that the latest data was not to be trusted, writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today.”

Rubio said that “16 of the last 17 reports have been significantly revised downwards after media helps them with their fake headlines[.] But all the fake numbers in the world aren’t going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris economic disaster every day.”

The latest jobs report showed that U.S. employers added 254,000 jobs and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1 percent in September — in an impressively strong snapshot of the economy that has quelled recent recession fears heading into the height of election season.

Republicans have continually railed against the Biden administration’s economic policies and suggested without evidence that economic data has been swayed by political influence as indicators show signs of strength.

Multiple economists discredited Rubio’s claims to The Washington Post. They challenged his assertion that the federal government had manufactured the data for political gain. And they also shot down his claim that 16 out of 17 recent jobs reports had been revised downwards after initial reports were false — although it remains unclear how Rubio arrived at his calculation because there are multiple ways to look at the data.

The agency has revised multiple recent reports upwards within the past 17 months, several economists pointed out.

“He is just wrong and mischaracterizing the current data,” said Julius Probst, a labor economist at AppCast, a recruitment marketing technology company, who is based in London.

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit, said it is a “baseless conspiracy theory that nonpartisan BLS employees are committing fraud.”

Rubio’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan agency of the Department of Labor, “collects, calculates, analyzes, and publishes data essential to the public, employers, researchers, and government organizations,” according to its website. The agency releases the latest jobs report on the first Friday of each month, and releases scheduled revisions to data multiple times to account for information not available in its release data.

Some economists speculate that recent large revisions could be related to a surge in undocumented migrants entering the workforce.

But because the data from recent months, including September, has yet to be revised a last time, some of the finalized jobs numbers that Rubio referenced will not be available until next year.

“At least a few of the seemingly-positive revisions are going to be negative relative to the original release,” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. “But we won’t know that for sure until next year.”

Rubio seems to be criticizing news reporting on the release of initial jobs report data every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — data releases that have long been reported on by national news outlets.

In August, the BLS reported the biggest revision to federal jobs data in 15 years.

The revised data showed that job growth in the United States in the year ending in March was far less robust than previously reported by the federal government. However, other data showed that other labor market benchmarks for April 2023 through March 2024 looked strong. Specifically, the unemployment rate during this period was near historic lows. And weekly requests for unemployment benefits also remained near longtime lows.

Rubio’s criticism aligns with former president Donald Trump’s reaction to August’s revision.

“They defrauded the people of our country with the job numbers,” Trump asserted in an interview with “Fox & Friends.” “You saw that? 818,000 fake jobs they put in the rolls.”

The former president also accused the Federal Reserve of “playing politics” by cutting interest rates by half a point last month, marking the first rate cut since 2020.

Rubio’s claims are “deeply corrosive because of the trust put in [BLS] numbers,” said Shierholz, who is also a labor economist.

“They’re used to set policy, including the Federal Reserve’s incredibly impactful decisions about interest rate policy,” she said. “We need people to know they’re doing good work and that they should answer correctly to the surveys.”

Rachel Siegel contributed to this report.