Claims of Trump vs Biden employment gains are misleading
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
A screenshot from Fox News shared by Donald Trump Jr., the former president's son, on August 18, 2023 on X, and by Daniel Scavino, the social media director in the Trump White House, on Facebook, on September 14 makes the assertion that 4.9 million jobs were created in the first two and a half years of Trump's Republican administration, compared with 2.1 million in the same period under Biden.
It also claims that twice as many manufacturing jobs were added using these same calculations. The same screenshot was shared on Instagram and TikTok as Biden and Trump ramp up their campaigns for the 2024 presidential election.
But the text in small print under the chart says: "New jobs exclude jobs prev lost to Covid." The result, consequently, misrepresents total employment under the two administrations as measured by official data (archived here).
From January 2017 when Trump took office to July 2019, employment rose from 145.6 million to 150.9 million a gain of roughly 5.3 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The same database shows nearly 13.2 million jobs added from January 2021, when Biden took office, through July 2023 -- employment rising from 143 million to 156.2 million.
Overall employment declined by 2.7 million when measured at the start and at the end of the Trump administration.
Similarly, the claim on manufacturing jobs is adjusted to exclude the effect of the pandemic and reopening.
The official data (archived here) shows approximately 460,000 manufacturing jobs were added in the first 30 months of the Trump administration and 800,000 in the comparable period for Biden. For the entire four years under Trump, manufacturing employment fell by 170,000.
Trump supporters argue that Biden should not be credited with post-pandemic job creation because the Democrat simply recovered jobs that already existed.
Others point to the broader picture of jobs gained by Biden compared with losses under Trump.
Many factors
While the numbers can be used to fit a narrative, economists say White House policies are just one of several factors impacting the economy and job creation.
"Administrations will always take credit for a strong economy and rarely take the blame when things aren't going well, but I don't think these comparisons are useful," said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics.
"Trends in the economy and the job market are the result of many factors apart from presidents' policies. Congress has control over taxes and spending, so presidents can only sign off on legislation that passed Congress," Vanden Houten said in a September 15 email.
"Trump's tax cuts may have given the economy a small boost, but the tariffs he imposed (largely maintained by Biden) were negative for growth. Legislation passed under Biden to support the economy during the pandemic, mainly the American Rescue Plan, likely contributed to a strong recovery in the economy but may well have contributed to high inflation."
Other analysts cited a range of factors impacting the economy including actions by the Federal Reserve and Congress in 2020 and 2021.
Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, noted that jobs grew more slowly under Trump than under the previous administration of Barack Obama.
"Should Trump be held responsible for the small shortfall, or was the slowdown in payroll jobs gains due to the fact that the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession was already quite mature by 2017? As the number of US unemployed shrank, it became harder to persuade new entrants and re-entrants to look for or accept new jobs," Burtless told AFP in a September 15 email.
"I find it ludicrous to argue that Trump should be credited with 100 percent responsibility for all of the job gains between Jan. 2017 and Feb. 2020 but none of the responsibility for 9.129 million lost payroll jobs in his last 12 months in office. At the same time, Trump's supporters argue that Biden should be assigned 0 percent of the responsibility for the recovery of the lost jobs, even though most of the recovery occurred during Biden's term in office."
AFP has fact-checked other claims about the US economy here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
