The US labor market’s sputtering.

If you had to extract a takeaway — the overarching message — from an extremely (embarrassingly, even) convoluted BLS release, that’s probably it.

On Tuesday, America’s preeminent statistical agency said headline hiring likely rebounded in November following a plunge in October, when Donald Trump’s deferred resignation program for federal workers shaved 162,000 from government payrolls.

As a quick reminder: The full impact of the Elon Musk-assisted effort to create a lean, mean federal workforce by making employees an offer they couldn’t refuse was reflected in the headline hiring tally for October, as workers who accepted the deal dropped off payrolls at the end of September.

Federal government employment continued to shrink in November, Tuesday’s release showed. Between the two months, federal payrolls fell 168,000.

Stripping out the impact of the deferred resignation program, headline hiring in October was 57,000, apparently. It was 64,000 in November, according to the first estimate. The range of guesses from economists for the November print was 20,000 to 127,000. Private payrolls were up 69,000 in November and 52,000 for October.

Revisions took 22,000 from August’s already-negative headline and 11,000 from September’s relatively robust readout. Those two prints are now -26,000 and 108,000, respectively.

The three-month NFP average, leaving the lost federal workers in the October headline, is 22,000. Excluding those workers from October’s print, it’s the highest since May. Hiring in November was entirely concentrated in health care, social assistance and construction.

As far as tradable prints, the unemployment rate for November, 4.6%, will probably garner far more attention than the headline payroll estimates. We’ll never know what the jobless rate was for October (it wasn’t possible to conduct the household survey for that month), but September’s UNR nearly rounded to 4.5%. Tuesday’s 4.6% print (4.564% unrounded) confirms the upward inflection.

The participation rate, at 62.5%, was the highest since April. That takes some of the sting out of the UNR uptick, but it doesn’t change the fact that the jobless rate’s the highest since September of 2021.

Average hourly earnings rose just 0.1% MoM in November and 3.5% YoY. Those are cool prints (consensus for the monthly pace was 0.3%) and will add to the case for additional rate cuts.

The release was accompanied by a bevy of caveats and footnotes, including a cautionary disclaimer on the household survey for November. “The November reference period was the week that contained the 12th of the month, a typical reference week [but] collection of data began a day late due to the shutdown and was extended to provide more time for contacting households around the Thanksgiving holiday,” the BLS said, adding that “the November response rate was lower than usual at 64%.”

The bureau went on to say that standard errors were “slightly higher than usual,” a state of affairs blamed on “multiple” factors including the low response rate, “composite weighting changes and the use of a two-month period of analysis rather than a one-month period.”

Again, it’s very difficult to extract the signal from all this noise. The implications for monetary policy are clouded further by Jerome Powell’s contention that headline payroll growth’s probably overstated by 60,000. If you apply that to November’s headline NFP print and the ex-federal government estimate for October, hiring was more or less flat last month and negative during the prior period.

This is why Powell said, last week, that the Fed won’t be inclined to put a lot of weight on data releases impacted by the government shutdown. Suffice to say “grain of salt” doesn’t quite cover it. As Roy Scheider might put it, “We’re gonna need a better idiom.”