The Trump administration appears to me to have effectively erased the official jobs report previously produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, based on information provided to Washington by a network of companies around the country. I don’t know much (anything?) about the BLS’s data collection methods, but it appears that not every company put its A team on the task of providing timely and complete data. So the BLS had to extrapolate and revise as new data flowed in. The administration’s “fix,” however has apparently been silence.

There is a second source of jobs data, however. It comes from ADP, the private company that specializes in payroll and other corporate support services, which works in conjunction with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. For a very long time, ADP has offered its own statistical analysis of the job situation in the US, using in part an anonymized version of its massive customer information, and typically released a day or two before the official BLS figures.

It’s still up and running.

Its conclusion is that hiring remains weak. The line that jumped out to me in the latest ADP press release is: “Leading the slowdown was manufacturing, which has lost jobs every month since March 2024, professional and business services, and large employers.” (The italics are mine.)

This can’t possibly be a surprise. Hard to expect anything else from the twin blows to the economy of raising the price of imported raw materials and simultaneously shrinking the labor force.