WASHINGTON (AP) — The monthly jobs report is already closely-watched on Wall Street and in Washington but has taken on a new importance after President Donald Trump on Friday fired the official who oversees it.
Trump claimed that June’s employment figures were “RIGGED” to make him and other Republicans “look bad,” yet he provided no evidence. The firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics appointed by former President Joe Biden, followed Friday’s jobs report that showed hiring was weak in July and had come to nearly a standstill in May and June, right after Trump rolled out sweeping tariffs.
Economists and Wall Street investors have long considered the job figures reliable, with share prices and bond yields often reacting sharply when they are released. Yet Friday’s revisions were unusually large — the largest, outside of a recession, in five decades. And the surveys used to compile the report are facing challenges from declining response rates.
Nonetheless, that hasn’t led most economists to doubt them.
“The bottom line for me is, I wouldn’t take the low collection rate as any evidence that the numbers are less reliable,” Omair Sharif, founder and chief economist at Inflation Insights, a consulting firm, said.
Heather Boushey, a top economic adviser in the Biden White House, noted that without Trump’s firing of McEntarfer, there would be more focus on last week’s data, which points to a slowing economy.
“We’re having this conversation about made-up issues to distract us from what the data is showing,” Boushey said. “Revisions of this magnitude in a negative direction may indicate bad things to come for the labor market.”
Here are some things to know about the jobs report:
Economists and Wall Street trust the data
Most economists say that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a nonpolitical agency staffed by people obsessed with getting the numbers right. The only political appointee is the commissioner, who doesn’t see the data until it’s finalized, two days before it is issued to the public.
Erica Groshen, the BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said she suggested different language in the report to “liven it up”, but was shot down. She was told that if asked to describe a cup as half-empty or half-full, BLS says “it is an eight ounce cup with four ounces of liquid.”
The revised jobs data that has attracted Trump’s ire is actually more in line with other figures than before the revision. For example, payroll processor ADP uses data from its millions of clients to calculate its own jobs report, and it showed a sharp hiring slowdown in May and June that is closer to the revised BLS data.
Trump and his White House have a long track record of celebrating the jobs numbers — when they are good.
Securing the data
Rigging the numbers would be difficult. Hundreds of economists and statisticians are involved in compiling the monthly jobs report, and they follow “transparent, well-established methodologies,’’ Heidi Shierholz, the Labor Department’s chief economist in the Obama administration, wrote in a commentary Friday.
“It is very, very difficult to tamper or to interfere with these numbers,’’ Elaine Chao, Labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration, told CNBC Monday.
In the week before the numbers are released, she said, “the process is very much locked down’’ with about 40 people involved in the final preparations. “If anything were to be awry, I think one of these 40 people in the final analysis would have spoken up,’’ Chao said.
The BLS commissioner only sees the numbers after they are final — usually the Tuesday before the report comes out on Friday. The White House Council of Economic Advisers gets a look and a briefing from the commissioner or BLS staff on Thursday, Groshen said.
These are the figures Trump is attacking
Trump has focused on the revisions to the May and June data, which on Friday were revised lower, with job gains in May reduced to 19,000 from 144,000, and for June to just 14,000 from 147,000. Every month’s jobs data is revised in the following two months.
Trump also repeated a largely inaccurate attack from the campaign about an annual revision last August, which reduced total employment in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5%. The government also revises employment figures every year.
Trump charged the annual revision was released before the 2024 presidential election to “boost” Vice President Kamala Harris’s “chances of Victory,” yet it was two months before the election and widely reported at the time that the revision lowered hiring during the Biden-Harris administration and pointed to a weaker economy.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Allentown, Pa. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Allentown, Pa. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Here’s why the government revises the data
The monthly revisions occur because many companies that respond to the government’s surveys send their data in late, or correct the figures they’ve already submitted. The proportion of companies sending in their data later has risen in the past decade.
Every year, the BLS does an additional revision based on actual job counts that are derived from state unemployment insurance records. Those figures cover 95% of U.S. businesses and aren’t derived from a survey but are not available in real time.
Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan professor and former chief economist at the Labor Department, stressed that the government also needs to be able to release the data in a timely manner, so that companies have a sense on a monthly basis about how the economy is faring. The revisions help to ensure the timely release while improving accuracy over time, she said, adding that lawmakers need to make investments to modernize data collection.
“The trade offs between cost, speed, and accuracy are decisions made by Congress,” she said. “The president seems frustrated by his own party’s policy choices around national statistics.”
Factors that cause revisions
Figuring out how many new jobs have been added or lost each month is more complicated than it may sound. For example, if one person takes a second job, should you focus on the number of jobs, which has increased, or the number of employed people, which hasn’t? (The government measures both: The unemployment rate is based on how many people either have or don’t have jobs, while the number of jobs added or lost is counted separately).
Each month, the government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies at over 630,000 locations — including multiple locations for the same business — covering about one-third of all workers.
Still, the government also has to make estimates: What if a company goes out of business? It likely won’t fill out any forms showing the jobs lost. And what about new businesses? They can take a while to get on the government’s radar.
The BLS seeks to capture these trends by estimating their impact on employment. Those estimates can be wrong, of course, until they are fixed by the annual revisions.
The revisions are often larger around turning points in the economy. For example, when the economy is growing, there may be more startups than the government expects, so revisions will be higher. If the economy is slowing or slipping into a recession, the revisions may be larger on the downside.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Allentown, Pa. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport, Sunday, Aug. 3, 2025, in Allentown, Pa. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Revisions seem to be getting bigger
The revisions to May and June’s job totals, which reduced hiring by a total of 258,000, were the largest — outside recessions — since 1967, according to economists at Goldman Sachs.
Kevin Hassett, Trump’s top economic adviser, went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday and said, “What we’ve seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers.”
Hassett blamed a sharp drop in response rates to the government’s surveys during and after the pandemic: “When COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed.”
Yet calculations by Ernie Tedeschi, an economic adviser to the Biden administration, show that while revisions spiked after the pandemic, they have since declined and are much smaller than in the 1960s and 1970s.
Other concerns about the government’s data
Many economists and statisticians have sounded the alarm about things like declining response rates for years. A decade ago, about 60% of companies surveyed by BLS responded. Now, only about 40% do.
The decline has been an international phenomenon, particularly since COVID. The United Kingdom has even suspended publication of an official unemployment rate because of falling responses.
And earlier this year the BLS said that it was cutting back on its collection of inflation data because of the Trump administration’s hiring freeze, raising concerns about the robustness of price data just as economists are trying to gauge the impact of tariffs on inflation.
U.S. government statistical agencies have seen an inflation-adjusted 16% drop in funding since 2009, according to a July report from the American Statistical Association.
“We are at an inflection point,” the report said. “To meet current and future challenges requires thoughtful, well-planned investment … In contrast, what we have observed is uncoordinated and unplanned reductions with no visible plan for the future.
A 6.0-magnitude earthquake hit Afghanistan’s eastern region near the Pakistan border on Sunday, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
USGS reported that the quake occurred 27km (16.77 miles) north-east of Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province, and at a depth of 8km (4.97 miles). It struck at 11:47 p.m. local time. USGS models estimate the shaking could result in hundreds of fatalities.
Nearly half a million people likely felt strong to very strong shaking, which can result in considerable damage to poorly built structures, according to the USGS.
At least nine people were killed and 25 others were injured in Nangarhar, Reuters reported, citing Ajmal Darwaish, spokesman for the province’s health department.
“Unfortunately, tonight’s earthquake has had human casualties and financial damages in some of our eastern provinces,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid posted on X.
“Right now, local officials and residents are making all the efforts to rescue affected ones. Support teams from the capital and nearby provinces are also on their way. All available resources will be used for the rescue and relief of the people,” he added.
Around 20 minutes after the quake struck, a 4.5-magnitude aftershock hit the same region, according to USGS, later followed by a 5.2-magnitude aftershock — both at a depth of 10km (6.21 miles).
An orange alert was issued by the USGS PAGER system, which predicts economic and human loss after earthquakes.
“Significant casualties are likely and the disaster is potentially widespread. Past events with this alert level have required a regional or national level response,” it said.
Ahmad Zameer, 41, a resident in Kabul, told CNN the earthquake was strong and jolted his neighborhood more than 100 miles from the epicenter. He added that everyone from the nearby apartment buildings rushed to the street in fear of being trapped inside.
In October 2023, more than 2,000 people died after a powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck western Afghanistan – one of the deadliest quakes to hit the country in recent years.
iOS 26 is coming, and it’s set to be a big deal. The new operating system gets an all-new naming scheme, doing away with the version numbers and sticking to numbers based on the upcoming year instead. But it’s not just the naming convention that’s changing. iOS 26 brings with it a series of major new features, an all-new design, and more. In fact, it could well be the biggest iOS update in many years.
So what are the most important new features to look forward to? I’ve been using the beta version of iOS 26 since the end of June. Here are my favorite new features.
A unified Phone app
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
Liquid Glass is the big new design language across all of Apple’s software — but Liquid Glass itself isn’t really a feature. It does, however, bring with it a series of secondary design changes across Apple’s apps, like the new Phone app.
In the new Phone app, the tab bar at the bottom of the screen is transformed into a pill-shaped bar with only three tabs: Calls, Contacts, and Keypad. So where are your voicemails and favorites? They’re integrated into the main “Calls” tab, where you can view voicemails attached to any recent calls, and see your favorite contacts at the top of the screen. It helps make the Phone app feel less cluttered, but if you prefer the old way, you can switch back to the “Classic” view to separate things out again. Before you do so, note that you can filter the calls in the Calls tab — so you can filter the view to only show voicemails, without having to scroll endlessly through all those spam calls just to find a voicemail that was left last week.
Call screening
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
The iPhone is also doing a better job of keeping spam calls at bay. There’s a new call screening feature that gives you some control over what happens when a call comes in from someone who’s not in your contacts. It can be accessed by opening the Settings app, scrolling down the Apps, and selecting Phone. From there, you’ll be able to choose from three call-screening options under the title “Screen Unknown Callers.”
The first option is to never screen, which basically means that your phone will always ring, whether the call is from an unknown person or not. The second option is “Ask Reason for Calling,” which means that a caller will be asked a few questions about why they’re calling, before your phone rings, and you’re provided with a transcript of their answers so you can decide for yourself whether or not to answer. The last option is “Silence,” which essentially silences all calls from unknown numbers and sends them straight to voicemail.
Better Visual Intelligence
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
Apple Intelligence may not have quite lived up to the hype from last year’s iOS 18, but it’s still getting better. In iOS 26, you’ll notably get better Visual Intelligence features. Visual Intelligence essentially gives Apple Intelligence access to the world around you, using the iPhone’s camera — so you can point it at a sign for translation, for example. In iOS 26, the big change is that it won’t just help you better understand the world around you, but also what’s on your iPhone, through the ability to use Apple Intelligence with screenshots.
Mashable Light Speed
To use this feature, all you need to do is take a screenshot, after which you’ll be able to save it to your Photos, like you always have, but you’ll also be given new “Ask” and “Search” buttons in the bottom corners. These are the same buttons you’ll see on the regular Visual Intelligence screen. Tap one of them depending on what you want to do.
Spatial Scenes on your lock screen
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
Spatial Scenes uses AI to give your photos a whole new depth. Basically, Spatial Scenes can take 2D photos and give them depth by taking objects in the photo and creating layers, then filling in some of the missing information with AI. When a Spatial Scene is created, you’ll be able to tilt your phone to see the image shift. It’s a neat effect, and definitely adds a whole new dimension to photos. And, to be clear, you can do this with many photos straight from the Photos app.
But my favorite use case for the feature is putting them on the lock screen. To do this, simply hold down on your lock screen to customize it. Along the way, you’ll see a new hexagonal button, which is the button for creating Spatial Scenes. You can toggle it on or off, and the effect should show up in real-time, so you can preview it before you save it.
Backgrounds in iMessage chats
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
iMessage is getting a little more customizable, too. In iOS 26, you’ll be able to add backgrounds to your chats, which can be a photo, a simple color, or one of the preset images of the sky, water, and so on. It isn’t a major change, but it’s a neat way to add a little more customization to your iMessage chats.
To add a background to a chat in iMessage on iOS 26, open the chat and tap on the name of the contact or group chat at the top. Then tap on the Backgrounds tab and choose from one of the options. The background will be visible for all participants in the chat who are running iOS 26 or later, so keep that in mind.
Safari is more minimalistic
Credit: Christian de Looper / Apple
Another app that’s getting the Liquid Glass minimalism treatment is Safari. In iOS 26, Safari gets out of the way and puts the content on the web page front and center. When you first open Safari in iOS 26, you’ll see the same buttons, but turned into hovering bubbles instead of a standard menu bar. You’ll get the buttons for forward and back, the three-dot menu button, and the main URL bar. As you scroll down a web page, however, all of those controls shrink down to just a small representation of the URL bar, maximizing the space that the web page can take up on the screen.
The trade-off is that the controls aren’t quite as accessible. To get the controls back on the screen, scroll up a little or tap on the small URL bar. Having used iOS 26 for a few months now, I can say that it hasn’t really interrupted how I use the web on mobile much. I tend to open and close tabs as I go, so I’m not using the URL bar or controls beyond that initial navigation to a web page. But others may not have the exact same experience.
Live Translation
Yet another phone call feature in iOS 26 comes in the form of Live Translation, which does exactly what it sounds like. With the feature, you’ll essentially be able to have phone calls in two different languages. When the person on the other end of the call speaks, an AI voice will say the translation in your language, and you’ll see the translated words on the screen. Then, when you talk, your words will be translated, and the person on the other end of the call will hear a translation of what you’re saying.
Perhaps the best thing about this feature is that it all happens on your iPhone. That means that the other person in the call can be on any random phone — your iPhone does the translating and sends audio of your translated voice in place of your actual voice. The feature only works for one-on-one calls, and supports English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish — though it’s likely other languages will be added down the line.
The Phillies have signed right-hander Walker Buehler, The Athletic’s Matt Gelb reports. The deal will become official once Buehler (who is represented by Excel) passes a physical, and Buehler is eligible for inclusion on a playoff roster because he is joining the Phillies before September 1. Gelb reported Philadelphia’s interest in Buehler earlier today.
It was just two days ago that the Red Sox released Buehler, bringing an early end to their partnership after Buehler signed a one-year, $21.05MM free agent deal last winter. Roughly $3.4MM remains on that contract, but the Sox will remain responsible for most of that money, as the Phils will owe Buehler just the prorated portion of the MLB minimum salary.
The signing is a flier to see if Buehler can bounce back in Philadelphia after a rough year in Boston. Buehler has struggled to a 5.45 ERA, 16.5% strikeout rate, and 10.8% walk rate over 112 1/3 innings this season, and opposing batters have taken him yard 22 times. The numbers aren’t far removed from Buehler’s regular-season performance over 75 1/3 innings with the Dodgers in 2024, when Buehler was returning to action after missing the entire 2023 campaign due to Tommy John surgery.
That was the second TJ procedure of Buehler’s career, and given how shaky he has looked in the aftermath, it remains to be seen if the righty can ever return to his past All-Star form. However, Buehler showed some flashes of his old self during the Dodgers’ playoff run in 2024, throwing 10 shutout innings over his last three appearance to help Los Angeles capture the championship. Most notably, Buehler even picked up the save to close out the clinching Game Five.
As Gelb notes, the Phillies are probably viewing Buehler as a bullpen contributor again for the playoffs given how the team already has its postseason rotation set. While losing Zack Wheeler for the season blew a big hole into the Phils’ pitching plans, there’s still plenty of starting options available in Cristopher Sanchez, Ranger Suarez, Jesus Luzardo, Aaron Nola, and Taijuan Walker. The Phillies were considering a six-man rotation for September when Wheeler was still available, so Buehler could potentially make a start or two just to help ease the innings burden on the other starters, and then slide into a relief role in October.
With a healthy 6.5-game lead over the Mets in the NL East, the Phillies have some breathing room to use September as a bit of a laboratory to figure out their optimal playoff roster. If Buehler’s struggles continue, the Phils could just leave him off a postseason roster entirely, with no cost to the team apart from his minimal salary.
A bigger-picture look at Buehler’s free-agent future should wait until his 2025 season is actually over. Buehler is still just 31 and probably wants to keep trying to re-establish himself as a starter, so he’ll likely sign another one-year deal (worth far less than $21.05MM) with a team in need of rotation help. Should Buehler pitch well as a reliever in Philadelphia, however, it might add an interesting wrinkle to the situation, as exploring a full-time role change would add more interest to Buehler’s market.
