How Many Manufacturing Jobs Has Trump Actually Lost?

In Donald Trump’s imagination, trillions of dollars are being invested in the United States. In the real world, factory construction, adjusted for inflation, was down by more than 10 percent from its year ago level, as of August (the most recent data available). Manufacturing employment, based on the data in the monthly employment reports, was down by 73,000 jobs year-over-year in November.

But the actual story on manufacturing employment may be somewhat worse than the monthly jobs data show. The monthly jobs data are based on the Current Employment Situation (CES), a survey that goes to 120,000 businesses and governmental units every month. While it generally gives a reasonably accurate picture of the economy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has to impute jobs gained for new firms that are not included in the survey and for firms that don’t answer the survey because they have gone out of business. This “birth-death” imputation tends to be inaccurate when the economy hits a turning point, like a recession.

BLS corrects for problems in the CES and its birth-death imputation by adjusting the jobs numbers annually with the data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). The QCEW is based on the records from state unemployment insurance offices. These records include more than 99 percent of all employers in the country, so the count in QCEW will be highly accurate.

BLS will make its annual benchmark revision to the CES data with the release of January data, although that will only be based on QCEW data from March. We will get the benchmark revision through March of this 2025 next in February of 2026.

While we don’t have final data from the QCEW, BLS does publish preliminary data that is more recent. Last week, it posted the data through the second quarter of 2025. This showed a considerably larger decline in manufacturing employment than the CES.

The CES showed a year-over-year decline in manufacturing employment as of June of 102,000. However, the QCEW showed a drop in manufacturing employment of 208,000, 1.6 percent of employment in the sector.

It is important to recognize that these numbers are preliminary. The state unemployment insurance offices did not have full data from all employers when the QCEW was tabulated, so the final data may show a somewhat different story. But based on the data we have to date; it looks like manufacturing is experiencing more of a slump than is generally recognized.

It also is worth noting that the overall employment picture may be somewhat worse than the monthly CES has been showing. The CES showed a year-over-year job gain of 1,534,000 jobs as of June. The QCEW showed a gain of just 420,000 jobs. The benchmark revision that is included with the January jobs report will give us a clearer picture of the jobs situation, at least through March of 2024, but for now it seems as though the jobs story may be somewhat more negative than it now appears. On the plus side, it means productivity is growing more rapidly.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.