President Trump dismissed Erika McEntarfer, the now-former Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), after rightfully accusing her of deliberately inflating employment numbers ahead of the election to boost Kamala Harris’s campaign. He pointed to a falsely reported “all-time high” in job figures that was later revised down by nearly one million jobs, an error he described as the most severe in over 50 years.
Supporting McEntarfer’s firing, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett cited a “partisan pattern” in BLS reporting and emphasized the need for a “fresh set of eyes” at the agency.
Apart from lying about the total number of jobs created, roughly a quarter of Biden’s job growth in some periods was government jobs funded by taxpayers, most job growth was part-time employment while full-time jobs remained flat, workforce participation declined which artificially improved the unemployment rate, and because of Biden’s catastrophic inflation, real wage growth was negative throughout his presidency.
When Biden handed off the economy to Trump, employment levels were still inferior to what Trump had built by 2019.
In 2020 and 2021, unemployment reached depression-era levels because of the destructive COVID lockdowns, with the official rate hitting 14.7% in April 2020, the highest since the Great Depression, though the actual rate may have exceeded 19% when accounting for measurement issues.
After June 2022, when employment finally returned to pre-pandemic levels, 22% of the 6.6 million jobs created through the end of Biden’s term were government jobs (Fiscal State of the Union: Biden’s Real-Wage Decline, House Budget Committee).
In 2023, government positions accounted for nearly 25% of all job gains, with some months seeing the public sector responsible for about one-quarter of total job growth. Government employment had the second-fastest growth of any sector, trailing only health care.
Over the final 12 months of Biden’s term, the number of full-time jobs remained essentially flat, meaning nearly all job growth came from part-time employment. In fact, December 2024 and January 2025 saw the steepest two-month decline in full-time jobs since the COVID lockdowns of March and April 2020. By July 2025, 4.7 million Americans were working part-time for economic reasons—people who wanted full-time work but were either unable to find it or had their hours cut.
The unemployment rate under Biden was also artificially improved due to a decline in labor force participation. Although the labor force participation rate rose from 61.3% in January 2021 to around 62.6–62.7% by mid-2024, it still remained 0.7 percentage points below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% in February 2020.
When adjusted for population growth, nearly 2 million more Americans were on the sidelines compared to when President Trump was in office (Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). By July 2025, the rate had fallen again, dropping 0.5 percentage point over the year to 62.2%.
At one point, inflation under Biden reached a 40-year high, severely impacting real wage growth. Although nominal wages rose, they failed to keep pace with price increases. Biden touted rising earnings as a success, but in reality, wages lost purchasing power. Since he took office, real wages have declined by over 5%. From January 2021 to May 2024, real average hourly earnings for all private sector employees dropped by 2.24%, while real median weekly earnings for full-time workers fell by 2.14% from Q1 2021 to Q1 2024 (Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
Nominal hourly earnings grew 19.2%, from $29.93 in January 2021 to $35.69 in December 2024, but with prices rising 21.0% over the same period, real wages fell by 1.5%. Over the full span from January 2021 to January 2025, wages rose 19.9%, but prices rose 21.5%, resulting in an overall 1.3% decline in real average hourly earnings.
While total employment eventually surpassed pre-pandemic levels, native-born employment remained well below trend. In fact, native-born workers held 121,000 fewer jobs than before the pandemic and 5.5 million fewer than the pre-pandemic trajectory.
All net job gains since the start of 2020 went to foreign-born workers, while native-born Americans experienced a net job loss. When comparing total employment to pre-pandemic levels, the increase was just 3.7 million jobs—still short of the 6.7 million jobs created under President Trump before the pandemic, meaning Biden fell about 3 million jobs behind that benchmark.
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