Trump Fires BLS Chief Over Job Data ‘Tampering’ as Hassett Calls for Fresh Leadership

When confronted with July’s unexpectedly small job gain, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett questioned the job report’s accuracy and called for “a fresh set of eyes” at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Friday’s report also included a sizable downgrade in the number of jobs created in May and June from original estimates.

“The fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people who wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” Hassett said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“And if you look back to just a year ago, for example, there was another massive revision from the [Bureau of Labor Statistics], almost a million jobs. A million jobs down that said that the Joe Biden jobs record was a lot worse than people thought,” Hassett added. “But we didn’t get the downward revision until after Joe Biden had dropped out. And so, once again, it made people think, ‘What are they doing?’ I got to tell you, if I were running the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and I had the biggest downward revision in 50 years, I would have a really, really detailed report explaining why it happened so that everybody really trusted the data.”

Hours after the jobs report was released President Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a President Joe Biden appointee. Trump accused McEntarfer on Truth Social of tampering with the job reports to make “the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

“Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were “taken away” on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM,” the president wrote.

Hassett asserted that experts should start from the beginning to understand better why the numbers have become unreliable, mentioning how these revisions began in 2020, when COVID hit. “Right now, we’ve got [Bureau] numbers that aren’t really a lot better than they were during COVID, and we need to understand why,” Hassett explained.

Hassett argued that data revisions over the past four years have been used as political propaganda, discouraging consumer and business investment, and creating “a real problem for the U.S.”

“I think that the president is right to call for new leadership,” Hassett added. “Erika’s a terrific person, but I think that it’s time for someone to get in there and fix this because these numbers are so crucial.”

The post Trump Fires BLS Chief Over Job Data ‘Tampering’ as Hassett Calls for Fresh Leadership appeared first on The Daily Signal.