In the article referenced..

"In September, the number of government workers as tracked by the Household Survey soared by 785K, from 21.421 million to 22.216 million, both seasonally adjusted (source: Table A8 from the jobs report). This was the biggest monthly surge in government workers on record (excluding the outlier print in June 2020 which was a reversal of the record plunge from the Covid collapse months before).

While government workers soared by the most on record, private workers rose by just 133K, a far more believable number, and one which however would indicate that the recent labor market malaise continues.

What is odd is that while September traditionally sees a huge jump in not seasonally adjusted government workers (as teachers go back to school), the BLS has traditionally smoothed over this jump using seasonal adjustments.

Only not this time, because as noted earlier by Andrew Zatlin of Southbay Research, while historically the September adjusted number has been relatively tame, regardless of how large or small the unadjusted number was, this time something changed as the unadjusted number of government workers absolutely exploded by a record 1.322 million leading to a record September increase in adjusted government workers.


"It's remarkable to see a one-month 3% jump in government jobs. Perhaps these are the hall monitors for the polling booths. Or perhaps these numbers are just wishful thinking. One thing is for certain, the Fed gets a hall pass next month when the ugly post-Hurricane numbers come out" said Zatlin.

Curiously, it wasn't just the Household survey that tracked an unprecedented increase in government workers: if one takes the Establishment survey unadjusted print (source Table B1 from the jobs report), one sees the exact same thing. Here, the number of not seasonally adjusted government workers soared by 918K (from 22.541 million to 23.459 million), while the number of not seasonally adjusted private sector workers plunged by 458K!

Why does any of this matter? For several reasons.

As the recent near-record downward revision in employment demonstrated, when some 818K jobs were magically eliminated, economic reports from the Biden admin has become unreliable to the point where even Fed chair Powell was questioning the credibility of BLS data and lamented that had he known how bad the labor market was, he would have cut in July. Well, same thing now, only in the opposite direction (which is to be expected with the election in just one month). So is the BLS now openly political and seeking to game the data to show Biden in a favorable light? That's a rhetorical question we leave to our readers.

And speaking of politicized government agencies, the BLS had a clear motive to add as many "government jobs" as it possibly could, not just to make the sequential increase in labor appear but to depress the unemployment rate further."

Hmmm.