National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on Sunday backed President Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), citing an alleged “partisan pattern” in U.S. job data reporting.
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Hassett referenced the timing of a preliminary benchmark revision released in August 2024 – shortly after former President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The revision revealed that job gains from March 2023 through March 2024 had been overstated by 818,000 jobs. Hassett said it represented the “biggest data revision in 50 years.”
“Look, 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 that wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” Hassett told “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream. “And so, if you look back to just a year ago, for example, there was another massive revision from the BLS, almost a million jobs, a million jobs down, that said that the Joe Biden jobs record was a lot worse than people thought. 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?”
Hassett accused the BLS of a lack of transparency, saying the bureau did not provide any detailed explanation of the August 2024 revision.
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“Instead, they have this little black box that moves the numbers around and makes people wonder, sometimes with partisan patterns. And so I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” Hassett said.
The White House economic adviser made reference to his speech at the 2015 BLS symposium where he spoke about modernization on the 100th anniversary of the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
“I talked about how the data can’t be propaganda,” Hassett said. “The data has to be something that you can trust because decision makers throughout the economy trust that these are the data, that they can build a factory because they believe, or cut interest rates because they believed. And if the data aren’t that good, then it’s a real problem for the U.S. And right now, the data have become very unreliable with these massive revisions over the last few years.”
The BLS reported on Friday that 74,000 jobs were added in July, well below the 110,000 estimate of economists polled by LSEG. The report also revised job growth in May and June downward. May’s gains were pared back by 125,000 to just 19,000 jobs created, while the June figures were revised down by 133,000 to just 14,000 jobs added that month.
According to the BLS, the last time a revision was down more than 133,000 was in March 2021, when it was revised down by 146,000 one year into the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Trump claimed that the country’s job numbers “are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfar, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory.” McEntarfar was appointed by Biden but received bipartisan support in the Senate earlier in 2024, with current Vice President JD Vance among Republican senators who supported her before he earned a place on Trump’s presidential ticket.
Despite the “disappointing” jobs report, Hassett pointed to how the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported on July 30 that GDP increased at an annual rate of 3.0% in the second quarter.
“It’s really important to keep our eyes on the horizon and the eyes on the horizon are seeing really smooth sailing ahead,” Hassett said. “When I first saw the big revisions, which, by the way, were the largest revisions going all the way back for 50 years, if we exclude the COVID years, when I saw those revisions I thought it must be a typo. That I’ve never seen a revision like this.”
Hassett argued that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would offset any impacts of tariffs on the U.S. economy and boost average family income by $10,000.
“The Congressional Budget Office has said that we’re looking at about three trillion in new tariffs in the United States. That’s something that’s really going to help us balance the budget. And all inflation numbers are lower than they’ve been in five years,” he said.
He also further backed the president’s call for new leadership at the bureau.
“They have to get back to ground zero and look at why the numbers have started to be so unreliable. And, you know, why did the numbers not really pick up the gig economy and so on,” Hassett said. “So right now we’ve got BLS numbers that aren’t really a lot better than they were during COVID, and we need to understand why. And so I think that the president’s right to call for new leadership. I think Erika is 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. “
FOX Business’ Eric Revell contributed to this report.
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