With the Biden administration now days away from handing over the White House keys to President-elect Donald Trump, supporters of the president have taken to social media to tout job growth during his four-year term.
Guy Kawasaki, an author and former tech industry venture capitalist, claimed that the number of jobs created under the Biden administration totaled more than under the previous three presidential administrations combined. “Joe Biden’s administration helped to create 16.6 million jobs,” Kawasaki shared on Threads, BlueSky, and LinkedIn. “More than the administrations of Trump, Obama, and George W. [Bush.] Remember 16.6 million four years from now.”
A popular left-wing X account, “Protect Kamala Harris”—which has no affiliation with the vice president—made a similar claim comparing percent change in job growth in the Biden and first Trump administrations. “Donald Trump ended his Presidency with 0.5% less jobs than when Barack Obama left office,” the account tweeted. “Joe Biden is ending his Presidency with 11.25% more jobs than when Donald Trump left office.”
The claim that more jobs were added during the Biden administration than during the presidencies of Trump, Obama, and Bush is true but missing context. Meanwhile, “Protect Kamala Harris” account’s claim is mostly true—slightly understating the percent change in job loss under the Trump presidency—but similarly missing context. The posts all ignore the economic Black Swan event that was COVID-19. The pandemic jolted job growth measurements with a steep and sudden drop—a net loss of 20 million jobs in the one-month span from March to April 2020—when state governments implemented shutdowns. Jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic largely recovered under the Biden presidency once the economy got rolling again. So, while it is true that the economy added 16.6 million jobs under the Biden administration—a percent gain of 11.6 percent—most of those represent people returning to or finding new work postpandemic.
As noted in a previous Dispatch Fact Check from June,
Biden’s employment growth numbers benefit from the fact that he took over as president when employment was in a deep but temporary valley. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated that the economy lost 21.4 million jobs in March and April of 2020 due to COVID-19 shutdowns, and when Biden took office the country still had almost 9.4 million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic. When compared to employment trends before the pandemic, however, only about 6.2 million jobs have been added to the economy on net during Biden’s time in office.
Meanwhile, Trump entered office in January 2017 with the U.S. economy’s nonfarm jobs totaling 145.6 million, and left office four years later in the midst of the pandemic with 142.9 million recorded nonfarm jobs, per Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). So Trump left the White House with about 1.9 percent fewer jobs than when he entered—more than the 0.5 percent loss claimed online—but excluding the final months of his presidency and before the onset of COVID-19 tells a different story. In February 2020—the last month before pandemic-induced health concerns and restrictions caused job growth to turn negative—there were 152.3 million nonfarm jobs recorded, a net increase of 6.7 million jobs from January 2017 and a percent gain of 4.6 percent.
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