The Trump administration on Tuesday blasted the Labor Department’s annual jobs revisions, which revealed the U.S. added hundreds of thousands fewer jobs than first thought – the largest correction on record.
The revisions, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that previous jobs reports were overstated by 911,000. The latest adjustment – on the higher end of Wall Street’s expectations – comes as President Donald Trump steps up his calls for the Federal Reserve to cut rates to stimulate the U.S. economy.
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“Today, the BLS released the largest downward revision on record proving that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“This is exactly why we need new leadership to restore trust and confidence in the BLS’s data on behalf of the financial markets, businesses, policymakers, and families that rely on this data to make major decisions,” Leavitt said, adding that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell “has officially run out of excuses and must cut the rates now.”
“Considering these reports are the foundation of economic forecasts and major policy decisions, there is no room for such a significant and consistent amount of error. It’s imperative for the data to remain accurate, impartial, and never altered for political gain,” wrote Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in a statement to Fox News Digital.
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“The Trump administration is putting a stop to years of neglect. We are committed to finding solutions to these problems, including by modernizing to improve transparency and deliver more accurate and timely data for American businesses and workers,” she added.
Ahead of the BLS data release, Trump took to Truth Social to call the Federal Reserve “broken” and criticize its reliance on outdated indicators.
“If the Fed had followed what we published, they would have raised rates in early 2021. The entire organization is broken. It needs to be fixed. They need to use modern sources of information,” Trump wrote.
“It’s too low, it’s too rigid, they followed data that’s years delayed. They don’t believe that money supply matters, it’s like the Pope not believing in Jesus,” he added.
In August, Trump abruptly fired the agency’s former commissioner, Erika McEntarfer. Her removal came hours after the agency released new data showing that job growth had been significantly overstated. The bureau revised its May and June figures downward by 258,000 jobs, marking an unusually large correction that drew sharp criticism from Trump.
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“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in an Aug. 1 Truth Social post.
On the heels of her firing, Trump tapped E.J. Antoni, the Heritage Foundation’s chief economist for the role. In an interview with Fox News Digital on Aug. 4, Antoni argued that the underlying methodology, economic modeling and statistical assumptions of how the BLS collects data are fundamentally flawed.
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“How on earth are businesses supposed to plan – or how is the Fed supposed to conduct monetary policy – when they don’t know how many jobs are being added or lost in our economy? It’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed immediately,” Antoni said.
“The problems in the BLS data have been evident for three years now, and they still haven’t been fixed,” he said, before he was tapped by Trump for the role.
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