White House officials defend Trump's firing of BLS chief
White House officials on Sunday defended President Trump's decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) following a weak jobs report, a move that has sparked broad criticism.
"The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable," Kevin Hassett, chair of the National Economic Council, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Hassett said in another interview on "Fox News Sunday" that the BLS commissioner has a responsibility to explain major revisions such as the one seen in Friday's jobs report, which showed 258,000 fewer jobs for prior months than initially reported.
“The big downward revision is something of a puzzle. I don’t think it was explained very well. And I think that markets might be as much unsettled by the fact that the data are so noisy,” Hassett said.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, one of Trump’s top tariff negotiators, said in an interview that aired on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that the president has “real concerns” about the jobs numbers reported by the Labor Department.
“Even last year during the campaign, there were enormous swings in the jobs numbers, and so sounds to me like the president has real concerns. You know, not just based on today’s, but everything we saw last year,” Greer said in the interview taped on Friday.
“You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers,” he added. “There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. And it’s, you know, the president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”
Trump on Friday directed his team to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the latest jobs report showed the country only adding 73,000 jobs in July, and major revisions for jobs added in May and June.
The move prompted immediate outcry from Democrats and a handful of Republicans, with some calling for an investigation.
McEntarfer was nominated by former President Biden and overwhelmingly confirmed by the GOP-led Senate early last year in an 86-8 vote.
Trump’s advisers underscored the president’s concerns about revisions to the labor data while defending McEntarfer’s firing.
Hassett noted that jobs data reported by the government has seen major swings since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers. In fact, they were extremely reliable, the kind of numbers that you want to guide policy decisions and markets, through COVID. And then when COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed. So the typical monthly revision often was bigger than the number itself,” Hassett said on NBC.
Trump, in axing the BLS chief, claimed without evidence that McEntarfer “faked the Jobs Numbers” before the 2024 election in order to boost former Vice President Kamala Harris’s White House bid, citing labor statistics revisions during the Biden administration that boosted jobs numbers ahead of the election.
The president accused her of manipulating data to make him and Republicans look bad, writing on Truth Social on Friday, “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
McEntarfer reacted to Trump's firing of her in a social media post over the weekend, saying it was the "honor of my life" to serve in the role and hailing the "vital and important work" carried out by civil servants at the agency.