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Hassett defends Trump’s firing of BLS chief over ‘unprecedented’ jobs data revisions

Aug. 03, 2025 12:14 PM ETBy: Rob Williams, SA News Editor34 Comments

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Director Of The National Economic Council Kevin Hassett Speaks To The Press At The White House
Kevin Hassett, one of President Donald Trump’s longest-serving economic advisers, on Sunday defended the president’s decision to fire the country’s chief labor statistician, saying on NBC’s Meet the Press that historic revisions to jobs data undermined public trust in the numbers.

“The most important thing for people to know is that it's the president's highest priority that the data be trusted, and that people get to the bottom of why these revisions are so unreliable,” Hassett said.

Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the agency published revised data showing that 258,000 fewer jobs had been created in May and June. The report, which also showed that 73,000 jobs had been created in July, shocked Wall Street, whose economists on average had expected the addition of 100,000 jobs.

U.S. stocks sold off on Friday as investors digested the start of new tariffs and the non-farm payrolls data, which one economist described as "the worst major economic report in the post-pandemic era."

“What we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers,” Hassett said in the interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker. “In fact, they were extremely reliable, the kind of numbers that you want to guide policy decisions and markets through COVID. And then when COVID happened, because response rates went down a lot, then revision rates skyrocketed so that the typical monthly revision often was bigger than the number itself.”

The most recent report revised the prior two months of non-farm payrolls downward by the largest amount since 1968. Hassett said that kind of swing “can make people wonder” about the reliability of the data.

He pointed to a past revision that showed 818,000 fewer jobs had been created during the Biden administration, but only after former President Biden had dropped out of the race for re-election.

Pressed on whether the administration had hard evidence that the data was deliberately “rigged,” Hassett responded: “The evidence is that there have been a bunch of revisions that could appear to parties… the number itself is the evidence.”

When Welker noted that an outlier isn’t proof of manipulation, Hassett replied: “It’s a historically important outlier. It’s something that's unprecedented. I've been looking at it for 40 years and I'm like, ‘it must be a typo.’”

Former BLS Commissioner William Beach criticized the firing, noting that final payroll data is produced by dozens of nonpartisan staff and that commissioners receive finalized figures only two days before public release.

Asked whether Trump was “shooting the messenger,” Hassett said: “Absolutely not. I mean, the bottom line is that there were people involved in creating these numbers… if I were running the BLS and I had a number that was a huge politically important revision, the biggest since 1968, actually revisions should be smaller, right, because computers are better and so on, then I would have a really long report explaining exactly what happened. And we didn't get that.”

Hassett said the president wants “fresh set of eyes over at the BLS” to improve transparency and reliability.

“We’re going to try to get the numbers so that they're transparent and reliable,” he said, denying that the firing was about punishing unfavorable data. “The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable. And if there are big changes and big revisions, we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example, then we want to know why. We want people to explain it to us.”

Despite repeated questioning, Hassett offered no additional proof that the revisions were wrong or intentionally manipulated.

“Yeah, there is very hard evidence that we're looking at the biggest revisions since 1968,” he said. “If you look at the number itself, it is the evidence.”

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