As controversy mounts over President Donald Trump’s indiscriminate, unilateral firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics on Friday, his top economic adviser, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett—one of the administration’s most visible defenders—appeared to break with the President’s justification for the firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer.
After being reminded that the markets believed the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ substantial downward revisions of numbers for April and May, wiping out a huge portion of any jobs gains, Hassett was asked: “Do you think we are starting to see a real slowdown in the jobs market?”
Rather than support Trump’s claim that “the numbers were phony,” “wrong,” and “rigged,” Hassett told CNBC, “Yeah, I think that the jobs numbers were slower than we expected.”
And then he explained the process, and why BLS does revisions.
“I think that, like, one of the explanations for revisions is they have more complete data, and so I think it is likely that the revisions are a better read of the data if they’re not being manipulated, and so, yeah, I would say that it’s a little bit weaker,” he acknowledged before promoting President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that guts Medicaid, SNAP, and cuts Medicare.
But he doubled down, declaring that while he believes “there are a lot of really good reasons to be super optimistic about the second half of the year,” he said, “absolutely that jobs number, if the revision turns out to be true, does suggest that there’s less momentum than we thought.”