U.S. added 818,000 fewer jobs than thought, adding to concerns about the economy

(I'm striving to keep my posts balanced as the last detailed examination I did was considered 'right-biased' because it was clarifying a 'left talking point')

Monthly and annual revision of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published employment numbers is nothing new.

What IS significant is that the accuracy in the last two years has gone down significantly for the surveyed data. One primary factor driving this is the low level of responses from the surveyed businesses in the monthly Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey*

While all administrations will spin information to be most favorable to them, the Biden administration is no more misrepresenting the number of jobs created/lost when the estimate was revised downward (such as revision of -103k jobs in December 2023) as the Trump administration did when it happened to them (such as revision of -81k jobs January 2020).

The biggest issue with the jobs report is understanding what it actually is. Most don't understand the report is not a realistic count of jobs added or lost and instead is a preliminary estimate of those numbers.

Each month the BLS publishes the preliminary estimates of job information in the Employment Situation Summary*. The information is from a survey of a smaller population of businesses (~119k) which it then extrapolates to estimate the total number of jobs at the country's ~10 million employers.

Estimates are then revised twice, before being held constant until the annual benchmarking process. Second preliminary estimates for a given month are published the month following the initial release, and final sample-based estimates are published 2 months after the initial release.

Each year, benchmarking* of the estimates is done to align employment estimates from the survey with employment counts derived from federal and state records. 97 percent (covered employment) of total nonfarm employment is reflected in State's Unemployment Insurance (UI) records and the other 3 percent (non-covered employment) is constructed from other sources such as the Railroad Retirement Board, U.S. Census Bureau, etc.

March is used as the benchmark month, and when the benchmark is published, the employment numbers for each month between that month and the previous year's benchmark (e.g.., the months between March 2024 back to March 2023) are then statistically updated so they are brought in line with the more accurate results.

The recently released report with the benchmark figures (see below) for March 2024 were 818,000 less than the estimated data (a -0.5% adjustment).

If the current administration was not telling the truth because the preliminary 2024 benchmark data shows that it was 818k less than the estimated data, does that mean they were very humble when the final 2022 benchmark numbers were 568k above the estimated data? Was the previous administration lying when the final 2019 benchmark was 514k less than the estimates?
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* Current Employment Statistics - CES (National) - https://www.bls.gov/ces/home.htm
* Employment Situation Summary - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
* Calculation of Current Employment Statistics (Benchmark) - https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ces/calculation.htm#benchmark