The Biden-Harris administration has a math problem and voters are paying for it

The FBI discreetly revised the reported violent crime rate in 2022, showing an increase rather than the purported decrease in crime that was widely touted by the Biden administration and reported by the media. 

When it comes to statistics that may allow voters to assess the Biden Administration’s performance, its math does not always add up. Revised crime statistics are just one example. 

The administration has also faced scrutiny for making significant adjustments to job numbers post release, often revising them down after the news cycle has moved on. Biden’s Homeland Security Department has also faced accusations that it is admitting thousands of “inadmissible” aliens at the border to paper over scope of the immigration crisis. 

“Why don't Americans trust the government anymore?” Senator Roger Marshall, R-Kans., asked in an episode of "Just the News, No Noise" set to air Thursday. 

“They overstate the job numbers. They understate the crime numbers. They throw lawfare at President Trump,” Marshall said. “This is why Americans don't trust the government anymore.” 

Revised crime stats

When the FBI published its September press release with the new 2023 crime data, the bureau failed to mention revisions to the 2022 numbers which showed that the claimed 2.1% decrease in the violent crime rate that year was actually a 4.5% increase, according to an analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center last week and first reported by RealClearInvestigations Wednesday. 

It does not appear the FBI publicly announced the revisions to the 2022 data and RCI only discovered the adjustments after investigating a single footnote in the 2023 report from the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which provides a overview of crime data across the country based on data submitted by various law enforcement agencies. 

“I wish they were transparent. Look, the thing that makes this look worse is that if you look at their press release for the data that they put out last month, there's no mention about updating or changing the earlier data in the report itself on crime, they have one footnote buried in in the report that says, you know, by the way, we updated data for 2022 but no mention that it went from being negative to positive,” President of the Crime Prevention Research Center Dr. John Lott told the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. 

“You know, maybe they're just embarrassed that they made some mistake. I suppose that's possible. Maybe it's the politics,” he added. 

The hidden adjustments rendered media headlines touting a year over year decrease in violent crime inaccurate, like one from USA Today that read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” 

The changes also raise concerns from researchers about the reliability of the FBI’s data. 

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, an economist and professor who teaches at the College of William & Mary and who studies crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point.”

"The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data,” he added. 

The FBI told Just the News in a statement "stands behind each of our Crime in the Nation publications" and in "2022, the estimated violent crime rate decreased 1.7 percent from 2021." 

The bureau said 2021 violent crime statistics were missing responses from agencies that were unable to respond in time after the bureau began transitioning its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program from "the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the more comprehensive National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for the 2021 data collection year." 

The changes to the raw data were significant according to the analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center. The updated 2022 data included 80,029 more violent crimes, which included 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults more than were originally reported. 

The revised data seems to track with another measurement, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which measures crime nationwide based on interviews with more than 200,000 people each year. The survey data shows violent crimes (except murder, which is not measured by the survey) skyrocketed roughly 55% under the Biden Administration, from between 2020 and 2023. 

The FBI’s revisions only came after the Biden Administration claimed credit for lowering violent crime during its tenure. In September, the White House released a statement from Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris who touted the declining violent crime rate. 

“Yet before President Biden and I took office, too many families were experiencing crime as our nation witnessed the highest increase in murders in recent history,” Harris said. “That is why we immediately got to work to get our counties, cities, and local police departments the resources they need.” 

“Today’s new data submitted to the FBI confirms that our dedicated efforts and collaborative partnerships with law enforcement are working; Americans are safer now than when we took office,” she added. "Our progress is continuing this year and builds on substantial decreases during the previous years of our administration.” 

The data shows the violent crime rate, while decreasing on average year over year, is only down 0.2% from 2020 to 2023 when taking into account the new, revised data. While the FBI recorded this slight decrease, violent crime is still significantly elevated compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. 

The revision to the data has elicited criticism from Republicans in Washington and reveals a pattern in the Biden Administration’s statistics calculations. 

Positive jobs reports followed by discrete revisions downward

The administration has previously come under scrutiny for several major revisions to the jobs report, with one of the largest downward adjustments made just 24 hours before Vice President Harris was set to accept the Democratic nomination for president. 

In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics slashed 818,000 jobs from its report that measured job growth from spring 2023 to spring 2024. The revised estimate stated the U.S. added 2.1 million jobs from April 2023 to March 2024. The original estimate pegged job creation at 2.9 million during that period, Market Watch reported at the time. The NY Post reported that this revision was the largest to US payroll figures since 2009. 

This was not the first time that the Biden administration’s jobs data was revised or contradicted. In December 2022, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve found that the administration had overstated job creation in the second quarter that year by over 1 million jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claimed the U.S. economy added 1.12 million new jobs but the fed found there were just 10,500 net new jobs that quarter. 

Donald Trump, the chief opposition to the Biden administration and Harris’ opponent in the presidential election, called the revision a “massive scandal.” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo was confronted by ABC News in August with the fact that the jobs report was later revised downwards with little fanfare. 

She initially replied that "When I hear that, first of all, I don’t believe it because I’ve never heard Donald Trump say anything truthful.” When told that the revisions came from the Department of Labor, Raimondo said “I’m not familiar with that.”

Immigration and the "CBP One" app

House Republicans also raised concerns that the Biden administration is using an immigration app to mask the true numbers of inadmissible aliens entering the United States, compounding the elevated levels of illegal immigration during the Biden years. 

According to documents obtained by the House Homeland Security Committee and reported in October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security used a processing app called "CBP One" to release hundreds of thousands of otherwise inadmissible migrants into the interior of the United State, Just the News reported. 

The materials obtained by the committee indicate that DHS admitted nearly all of the inadmissible aliens who arrived at entry points along the border with an appointment made through CBP One. Between Jan. 12, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2023, more than 278,431 appointments were made through the app, with roughly 95.8% of individuals securing parole into the U.S. interior, the committee found. 

“Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas has utterly abused the CBP One app in his quest for open borders,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., said at the time. "These numbers are proof that Mayorkas' operation is a smokescreen for the mass release of individuals into this country who would otherwise have zero claim to be admitted.” 

A total of 1.3 million migrants have entered the country under this legal mechanism using the CBP One app, including violent criminals, terror suspects, and gang members, according to the NY Post. 

The Biden-Harris administration first introduced the app in Jan. 2023 in an effort to stem the tide of illegal immigration at the border, leading critics to say the app would mask elevated levels of border entries.

President Biden also signed a series of executive orders, including one that banned immigrants who crossed the border illegally from receiving asylum. At the same time, the Biden-Harris administration is touting decreased illegal border crossings, but did not address the tens of thousands of approvals granted through the CBP One app.