Elon Musk’s DOGE may have completed much of its work in the federal bureaucracy, but the trickle-down effect from Musk’s chain saw contributed to the downward employment revisions that drew President Trump’s ire and led to the now-infamous firing of the labor statistics commissioner.
DOGE’s cuts to government jobs are contributing to downward employment revisions because the government typically reports its payrolls to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) late, and increasingly later reports often lead to bigger revisions, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told Fortune. He noted that the government does not report in time for the initial employment estimate provided by the BLS.
