Trump Lauded Known-False Employment Numbers--More Distorted Than He Criticized in 2015

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"It's going to be a problem of credibility now with the BLS," said Mike Wolford, Director of Customer Success at Claro Workforce Analytics. "[BLS] looks incompetent or political. Twenty million people didn't finish unemployment in the last 30 days. I would have thought lag time was an explanation because it's a lot to count actually, but to find out they made a five-million-person error, knew about it, didn't correct it for the sake of ‘data integrity' when they literally update things all the time. That is suspicious and, at least, merits investigation," Wolford added.

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A recent analysis from the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago estimated that 42% of people furloughed will never get their old jobs back and only 30% of those laid off will land new jobs later this year. Some companies have already acknowledged that they will layoff workers once they meet their obligation.

People who have finished collecting unemployment benefits, but did not find new jobs, fall off the government's radar and are not accounted for in the official unemployment statistics. In an interview with "Face the Nation" back in 2015, Trump specifically called out then President Barack Obama, referring to unemployment data, saying "it's a phony number" and lambasted the practice of ignoring people who've given up looking for a job by excluding them from the unemployment statistics.