Fact Checking President Biden’s Claims About Job Creation

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden tweeted that in his first year as president, his administration “created 6.4 million jobs,” calling it “the biggest year of job creation in American history.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the claim that job growth in the Biden administration has hit record levels—back in July 2021, the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, said that Biden had created 3 million jobs in his first five months in office, a claim The Dispatch Fact Check determined lacked context. The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the economy during the latter stages of the Trump administration, causing large job losses that were then regained as the economy slowly began to reopen.

In February 2020, nonfarm employment in the United States was at 152,523,000 jobs. The stay-at-home orders and stringent lockdown restrictions of the early months of the pandemic caused nonfarm employment to dip to 132,994,000 in May 2020 before a loosening of restrictions caused employment to increase once again. By the time Trump left office in January 2021, nonfarm employment was at 142,736,000 jobs, 2,876,000 fewer than when Trump entered office and 9,787,000 fewer than the employment levels right before the pandemic began.