Uncertainty. Companies like to hire when they are confident about the future but they pull back when they are less certain about economic tides. Swift tariff announcements from the executive branch have created uncertainty. Historically, tariffs were written by Congress. Establishment and enactment of these was slow moving and allowed businesses to plan many years in advance. With the executive branch acting so quickly, business are cautious because they don't know if the tariff will be 15% or 50%; making it hard to plan ahead. This means that businesses need to plan for a large degree of volatility, and they are less likely to hire more staff until they have a more clear picture of what their needs may be once tariffs are established. Essentially, they are waiting to see which way the economic winds blow. Tariffs don't only impact importers. Since so many US goods are imported, tariffs play a huge role on the spending power of US consumers. The US is very dependent on global trade and imports. So when the cost of those imported goods goes up, consumers have less money to spend on domestically created goods and services as well. In the long run, this can create a shift towards more domestic goods production, but such a transition will be very slow. Meaning that short term prices will rise and households will be pinched for money if high tariffs are enacted. This creates worries about consumer spending that results in a reluctance to hire new employees - since CEOs believe that their business growth opportunities are uncertain. More on reddit.com

The most important thing to understand is that BLS is not directly estimating the number of jobs gained or lost each month. Rather, they are estimating the total number of employees (payroll positions) each month. The job growth/loss numbers are the just the difference between the monthly total estimates. Between this release for July 2025 and the June 2025 release last month The estimate for the total number of employees in May fell from 159,577,000 to 159,452,000. The estimated number of employees in June fell from 159,724,000 to 159,466,000. Those are revisions of -0.08% for May and -0.16% for June. The problem with the growth/loss estimates is that even good growth is just a tiny fraction of the total number of jobs. For example, 300,000 jobs is just 0.18% of 159.5 million jobs. It doesn't take a large revision to the total number of jobs to make a huge change in the number of jobs added or lost. You should definitely take the monthly job growth/loss numbers with a grain of salt. Especially the initial number, before the first and second revisions. I wish media outlets emphasized this more. But that's a problem with how this particular statistic is estimated. It's not an indictment of all or even most of the data that BLS publishes. As for why there are frequent revisions: the main reason is because they get more data: CES estimates are considered preliminary when first published each month because not all respondents report their payroll data by the initial release of employment, hours, and earnings. BLS continues to collect payroll data and revises estimates twice before the annual benchmark update (see benchmark revisions section below). https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ces/presentation.htm#revisions And you can find statistics on the past monthly revisions here: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary More on reddit.com

Edit: since it’s a Friday and I’m waiting on the hot tub delivery, I am high as shit and much of this may make…less sense than usual They have always been preliminary numbers. And it’s a good thing, because it shows transparency. Now, yes, the size of the revisions were very large. But I don’t see that as a large problem. The reason is that calibrating a model, in a period of considerable economic uncertainty, leads to larger “errors”, which are a feature of nearly everything economists do. And we have tariff (and therefore price and employment) uncertainty, labor market uncertainty (immigration policy, ICE raids), Truth uncertainty (can someone take his phone away from him), … But, to answer your specific questions. There are private and survey data points that the Fed also uses. Consider the ADP employment numbers, which were anemic. When there is considerable discrepancy about numbers, the Fed is more cautious. Beyond that, monetary policy can be implemented relatively quickly, so missing a rate cut to stimulate the economy is not as harmful as, say, fucking up some legislative priority. So, the Fed has a lot more data at their disposal, and they know that there is considerable uncertainty which can lead to larger errors, so they do act more cautious. 2. It’s the slowdown that’s meaningful. Yeah, it’s a small fraction of the labor force, but with structural, frictional, and cyclical unemployment happening, the imperfections in labor market matching, and issues related to duration of unemployment, a lack of job creation means that if some dominos start to fall in one place (let’s say, some economic shock, like COVID), there are less places for those affected to flee (new job). That means that things can spiral out of control. More on reddit.com

How do they miss it by 133,000 jobs? There’s a calculator on every phone. More on reddit.com