These data are released on the first of each month. That’s not a lot of time to tabulate, across all employers across the whole country, all the people hired and fired during the month. That’s why they call the 2 previous months ‘preliminary.’ They’re usually pretty good at estimating, and adjusting their estimates for the usual sources of error, but when conditions change dramatically, those fudge factors aren’t so good.

So, if you’ve got a President out there making wild, often contradictory claims three times a week, market traders and corporate execs trying to plan based on those announcements, or just put off by the uncertainty, then you should expect ‘preliminary’ statistics to be worse guesses than usual.