The public was supposed to receive the jobs statistics from September last month, but the government shutdown prevented the data from being released, leaving everyone in the dark. The delayed figures are finally out, and they’re not horrible. CNBC reported:

The U.S. economy added substantially more jobs than expected in September, according to a long-awaited report Thursday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 119,000 in the month, up from the 4,000 jobs lost in August following a downward revision. The Dow Jones consensus estimate for September was 50,000.

While the top-line takeaway showed decent growth in September, there was some discouraging information below the surface. The unemployment rate, for example, edged higher to 4.4% — that’s the highest it’s been in four years — and revised tallies from the summer pointed to a struggling job market. In fact, according to the new BLS report, the economy actually lost 4,000 jobs in August.

As for the job totals from October, the Labor Department announced this week that the data will not be released independently. As The New York Times explained, “A part of the October jobs report that surveys employers will come out with the November jobs report in mid-December, slightly later than previously scheduled, along with data on job turnover. But the agency said that it could not retroactively collect surveys from households, which determine the unemployment rate.”

As for the larger context, in light of the newly available statistics, the data now suggests that the U.S. economy added 684,000 jobs over the first nine months of 2025. That might sound like a decent number, but over the first nine months of 2024 — when Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was almost 1.4 million jobs, and in the first nine months of 2023, the U.S. economy added nearly 2 million jobs.

In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first nine months of this year show the slowest job growth in the U.S. since 2010, when the economy was still struggling to recover from the Great Recession.

When Trump sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham for an interview that aired last week, the president asserted that the current U.S. economy is “as strong as it’s ever been.” The host asked a reasonable follow-up question: “Why are people saying they’re anxious about the economy?”

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The Republican questioned the premise. “I don’t know that they are saying that; I think polls are fake,” Trump replied. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

It was a claim the president has repeated incessantly of late. To hear Trump tell it, the current state of the economy isn’t just amazing, these are quite literally the single greatest economic conditions ever seen by American eyes in the history of the United States.

When it comes to job growth and unemployment, the rhetoric remains at odds with reality. Indeed, the question the president and his White House team ought to face is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 15-year low?”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.