'Highly dangerous': Trump nominee says president's new move will backfire on the economy
A Donald Trump nominee came out swinging on Sunday against the president and a White House economist, saying their recent actions could be "highly dangerous."
Fortune over the weekend published an article called, "Two Trump-appointed economists—and longtime friends—are clashing over Trump’s jobs data," in which they reveal some new insights from former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner William Beach, who was a Trump nominee.
According to the piece, Beach said that "every number on the jobs chart President Donald Trump touted in the Oval Office on Thursday was wrong."
"Still bitter over last week’s 'rigged' jobs report, which showed weaker-than-expected job growth, Trump convened an impromptu press conference Thursday evening to showcase graphs with what he called 'all-new numbers,'" the report states. "Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist, said during the press conference that the numbers justified Trump’s firing of former BLS Chief Erika McEntarfer. He estimated that over the last two years of President Joe Biden’s administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs."
But the numbers provided by Moore are suspect, according to his "good friend" and fellow Trump appointee.
"Beach—who Moore said he’s known for 30 years and calls a 'good friend' —called those numbers 'the strangest thing in the world,'" according to the report, which noted that Beach "found problems across the board."
“He should have known better than to do that,” Beach said of his good friend.
Then, there was a back and forth:
"Moore countered that Beach misunderstood his method. He said the team was comparing the initial 'headline' jobs numbers released each month to the final revised and benchmarked numbers, and summing those differences, rather than simply pulling the final August correction," the report states. "Beach also argued the benchmark revision figure on the chart was incorrect and didn’t align with BLS’s published data. The last bar, labeled 'total revisions,' was mathematically flawed, he said, because it added benchmark revisions to monthly revisions, even though the benchmark already incorporates those monthly changes—'like counting the same apple twice and pretending you had two.'"
Then, Beach went even further.
"Trump’s suspicions are more than just puzzling, Beach said. They were also 'highly dangerous.' Markets rely so heavily on trust in the jobs report data, he said, that the damage from Trump’s words and actions has likely already happened," according to the report. "Drawing on his experience in the private sector, he explained that uncertainty in some metrics forces business leaders to widen their 'margin of error' when making investments, which can kill deals. If companies doubt the accuracy of federal statistics, he warned, they’ll eventually turn to alternative measures."