Kevin O'Leary on Trump's BLS firing: 'Don't shoot the messenger'
“Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary on Friday criticized President Trump for proposing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) head be fired after reporting a decline in job growth.
Hours before his comments, Trump slammed Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in a Truth Social post alleging she altered job reports to favor former Vice President Harris during the November election and said he’d given his team orders to dismiss the Biden appointee “IMMEDIATELY.”
Her departure comes three years ahead of schedule.
“We had a bad print on jobs. I did not agree on whacking the commissioner. I don’t like that,” O’Leary said during a Friday appearance on CNN.
“Whacking statisticians makes no sense whatsoever. You don’t shoot the messenger,” he added.
O’Leary has been relatively supportive of Trump’s policies, including his unprecedented global trade negotiations in recent days. However, he said there's some uncertainty surrounding markets due to outstanding deals with major U.S. partners.
“I think the market is a little concerned about major trading partners not getting deals yet. It's not a good idea to have 35 percent tariffs on Canada. We know that that's coming into place at midnight right now unless something magic happens,” O’Leary told anchor Kasie Hunt.
“So with this volatility, it's more about future earnings. But a lot of this stuff, including the trade print or the job print noise, just noise. You don't make decisions based on one print,” he added.
Friday’s job report touted the creation of 73,000 jobs but also lowered previously reported numbers from job growth in May and June by 200,000 citing a substantially reduced statistic than originally published.
Trump slammed McEntarfer for the errors.
“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes. McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months,” the president wrote.
“Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’...” he added.
However, onlookers critiqued the president for slamming the BLS commissioner for the shortcomings. "President Trump is once again destroying the credibility of our government by firing expert and nonpartisan officials because he does not like the facts that they present," said Max Stier, the CEO of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service told NBC News.
"Governments that go down this path find themselves in ugly territory very quickly."