Somebody’s fired, and I don’t just mean the 92,000 people who fell off a payroll last month.

That’s how many jobs the US economy lost on net in February: 92,000, according to BLS statisticians who clearly didn’t get the memo about bad news being grounds for dismissal.

The headline was a woeful miss to consensus. Economists expected a 60,000 gain. You can bet Donald Trump wants to know who at the bureau’s “responsible” for this debacle. “Guilty” parties could be McEntarfered. (That’s an action verb since last summer.)

Insult to injury: Revisions accompanying the report flipped December’s headline from a 48,000-job gain to a 17,000-job loss. As for January’s robust readout, it too was revised lower, albeit only by 4,000.

The three-month moving average for the NFP headline’s now on the brink of turning negative again, at just 5,600.

I won’t get too caught up in the futility discussion, but I’d be remiss not to quickly note that this is still more evidence in support of my long-standing contention that these figures are meaningless, and becoming more so over time. It’s impossible to tally aggregates for an economy the size of America’s with anything approaching precision.

Consider this: ADP said the private sector added 63,000 jobs last month. The private payrolls print in the BLS report was negative 86,000.

With allowances for the constellation of factors which “explain” that discrepancy, the inescapable bottom line from a common sense perspective is that both tallies purport to measure the hiring impulse among private-sector US employers during the same month. One says those employers hired 63,000 people, the other says they fired 86,000.

I won’t purport to know if the Kaiser Permanente strike might help explain that disparity, and between them, ADP and the BLS would surely say the discrepancy can be reconciled by way of methodological differences. But, again from a common sense perspective, if we’re telling the public that we’re measuring the same thing, for the same month, the tallies shouldn’t be diametrically opposed.

Do note: BLS private payrolls are now the lowest since December of 2020. That makes a total mockery of Scott Bessent’s tagline about “re-privatizing” the US economy.

With (all) that out of the way, the NFP headline constitutes a terrible result, even considering the impact of the above-mentioned strike activity in health care. January’s upturn was apparently a head fake. By major category, only social assistance added a meaningful number of jobs last month, the BLS release indicated.

On the household survey side (which was impacted by revisions from updated population estimates), the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%, above estimates. Indeed, at 4.441% unrounded, it was perilously close to a 0.2ppt overshoot versus consensus.

The participation rate fell to just 62%, the lowest since December of 2021. A rising unemployment rate concurrent with a falling participation rate is a very poor optic.

Coming back to the establishment survey, average hourly earnings rose 0.4% MoM and 3.8% YoY. Those figures were ahead of estimates, although for non-managers, monthly wage growth was in-line at 0.3%.

This release isn’t amenable to spin. I’d say the Trump administration will try anyway, but given how objectively poor the readouts are versus consensus (and also relative to the now defunct narrative which said last year’s hiring slowdown ended in January), The White House may result to casting aspersions, making excuses or, who knows, starting a war.