Trump administration officials have raised questions about the data amid accusations of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ rejection.
The White House defended the firing of President Donald Trump, the director of compiling employment statistics, after raising concerns about the future reliability of layoffs, which are important.
Trump fired Erica Mantelfer, director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday, claiming without evidence that the latest employment report was “equipped” to make him look bad.
On Sunday, White House National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett denied Trump was “shooting a messenger” and questioned the accuracy of the numbers showing employment that were far weaker than previously reported.
“The president wants his people, so looking at the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett told NBC News’ Meet the Press, calling the downward revisions of employment growth in May and June “unprecedented” and “historically significant outliers.”
“And if there are big changes and big revisions, I’m hoping for a big revision of employment data, for example, in September. I want to know why. I want people to explain it.”
Speaking later on Sunday on Fox News, Hassett once again poured doubts over the official numbers.
“I think all we need is the fresh eyes of BLS, someone who can clean this,” he told Fox News Sunday.
US trade representative Jamieson Greer also defended Trump’s firing of Mantelfer, saying the president has “real concerns” about employment data.
“I hope you have some credible numbers,” Greer said CBS News’ “facing the public.”
“There are always revisions, but sometimes we see these revisions go in a very extreme way, and that is what we know is the president.
The latest jobs released Friday showed 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated, and 73,000 more jobs were added in July than expected, damaging Trump’s claim that the economy has not been adversely affected by his sweeping fees.
Trump said Sunday that he will announce a new BLS director and a candidate to fill the positions opened with the resignation of Federal Reserve Gov. Adriana Coogler within days.
Trump’s firing of Mantelfer, a career bureaucrat appointed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support in 2024, prompted criticism from both economists and Republican and Democrats.
In a statement Friday, friends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a group co-led by former BLS directors William Beach and Erica L. Groshen, accused Trump of politicizing statistical agencies and undermining confidence in official government data.
“Official US statistics are gold standards around the world,” the group said.
“When leaders of other countries politicized economic data, it destroyed public trust in all official statistics and government science.”
