The dispute over Stephen Moore’s chart turns on a basic question: Can a presidential jobs claim be assessed when its underlying data and calculation choices are not public?
Donald Trump used a jobs graph prepared by Stephen Moore to argue that his economic record outperformed Joe Biden’s. But the chart’s underlying Census Bureau figures had not been published, according to The New York Times, limiting outside review of the data, definitions, adjustments and calculations behind its conclusion.
The episode illustrates why competing job-growth claims can produce sharply different narratives. Dataset selection, the date used as a baseline and the way employment is attributed to a president can all materially affect the result.
Public review is the central issue
Moore, a conservative economist affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, said his charts drew on unpublished Census Bureau data, according to the Times. That does not mean the figures are necessarily wrong. Researchers and government agencies can work with preliminary or specialized information before it is released publicly.
Still, outside analysts cannot fully assess a chart without access to its inputs and method. For a claim presented as evidence of a president’s job performance, other economists need to be able to inspect the approach, rerun the calculations and compare the result with commonly used measures.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes monthly employment indicators, including total nonfarm payroll employment from its Current Employment Statistics survey. Those estimates are revised as more complete information arrives. Revisions can be substantial, but the process is intended to improve estimates over time rather than preserve a simple political scorecard.
One payroll line cannot settle the argument
Payroll figures are only one way to assess the labor market. Economists may also consider labor-force participation, unemployment, wage growth, hours worked, the share of working-age people with jobs, population growth and whether hiring is concentrated in a small number of sectors.
Those measures do not eliminate political disagreement. They do show why a single graph cannot capture the entire labor market or automatically establish which administration had the stronger record.
Trump and Moore can argue that their chosen measure identifies labor-market changes that official payroll figures do not fully capture. Supporters may contend that standard reports overlook differences in who is getting jobs or whether growth is reaching particular groups of workers.
Critics, however, can point out that a chart challenging BLS conclusions needs a transparent methodology and data others can examine. Without them, it is difficult to determine whether the graphic identifies a meaningful trend or selects figures that favor a preferred conclusion.
COVID-19 makes term-to-term comparisons especially difficult
Trump’s first term included both pre-pandemic job growth and the 2020 economic shutdowns. BLS payroll data show that the United States added jobs in most months before the pandemic, then lost more than 20 million jobs in April 2020, an unprecedented decline.
The recovery began before Trump left office and continued during Biden’s term. Large gains during the rebound partly reflected workers returning to jobs lost during shutdowns, rather than new expansion from a normal economic baseline.
That history permits competing narratives built from real numbers. A president can highlight gains during a recovery, while opponents can emphasize losses over an entire term. Neither approach alone answers how employment performed relative to the conditions facing the economy.
The same caution applies to Trump’s second term. Early employment results can reflect conditions inherited from the prior administration, Federal Reserve policy, business investment decisions made months earlier and revisions to previously reported data. Presidents can influence economic conditions, but they do not directly hire most workers counted in the monthly report.
Starting points can reshape a jobs comparison
Even a technically accurate chart can give a distorted impression if its baseline is unclear. Job totals may look very different depending on whether a comparison begins before or after a recession, a pandemic shutdown, a major revision or a population change.
A single line that treats the pandemic collapse and recovery as uninterrupted presidential job creation has difficulty separating policy effects from an extraordinary public-health and economic shock. The choice of time frame is therefore not a minor technical detail; it can shape the conclusion a chart appears to support.
Trump presented the charts after a weak BLS report
According to the Times, Trump called reporters to the Oval Office in August 2025 to display Moore’s charts. He called them “all new numbers” and said they offered a better account of his economic performance than the latest federal jobs report.
The presentation followed weaker-than-expected employment figures from the BLS. Trump criticized the report, claimed without offering evidence that the numbers were rigged, and fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
That context made the charts part of a wider argument over which labor-market measures deserve public trust. There is a distinction between questioning a particular monthly report and claiming that an entire statistical system is manipulated. The BLS publishes its methodology, issues revisions and relies on career staff whose data are used by businesses, investors, state governments and economists across the political spectrum.
Release of the data would allow the claim to be tested
The unresolved issue is not whether Moore’s graph is visually persuasive. It is whether the Census data, formulas and comparison choices behind it can be released and evaluated.
Until then, the chart is best understood as an argument rather than a settled measure of Trump’s job-creation record. A more durable assessment would use transparent data, consistent time periods and an explicit accounting of the pandemic’s disruption.
For readers weighing rival employment claims, the practical checks are to identify the data source, find the starting date, ask how employment is defined and determine whether the numbers are public. In this case, those details carry more weight than the chart’s headline conclusion.
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