“The President wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett said on NBC.
The latest jobs report, which triggered Trump’s anger, hit at an especially sensitive point for the President.
He called the report “A SCAM” in a post to social media, saying without evidence that McEntarfer “had the biggest miscalculations in over 50 years”.
For months, he has boasted multiple times a week that the US now has the “hottest” economy in the world.
He has repeatedly told audiences that he has received that assessment from people he has talked to, attributing the comment at different times to Middle Eastern monarchs, European leaders and American businessmen.
The Labour Department’s latest monthly report showed the labour market to be at best lukewarm, adding just 106,000 new jobs over the past three months.
That’s far fewer than previously estimated and less than the amount needed to keep unemployment from rising.
The report, which included steep downgrades of the estimates for jobs added in May and June, suggested that Trump’s tariffs have started to seriously slow the economy.
The revisions, while large, were not unheard of - final statistics on the number of jobs in the economy often differ widely from the initial estimates.
When NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker pressed Hassett for proof to support Trump’s claim that those numbers were “rigged,” he deflected.
“The revisions are the hard evidence,” he said, adding, “If I was running the BLS, and I had a number that was a huge, politically important revision … then I would have a really long report explaining what happened, and we didn’t get that.”
Where Hassett sees impropriety, Trump’s former BLS commissioner, William Beach, sees revisions that resulted from McEntarfer “trying to do a better job, getting more information”.
On CNN, Beach rejected the argument that McEntarfer somehow manipulated the data for political purposes, saying that “by the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system.”
McEntarfer has not commented publicly on her firing.
Her dismissal comes amid broader concerns from policymakers and economic analysts about increasingly shaky government economic data over issues that, in many cases, predate her tenure leading the bureau.
Falling response rates to government surveys, coupled with pandemic-driven seasonal quirks and long-standing budget strains, have made it harder to collect and analyse reliable data, officials have said.
Agencies responsible for the data have also shed staff through early retirements, deferred resignations and normal attrition.
Beach said that he will still trust the jobs numbers moving forward but that the attack by Trump undermines the public’s trust in the bureau.
“I don’t think there’s any grounds at all for this firing,” he continued. “And it really hurts the statistical system. … This is damaging.”
Polls suggest the public has more trust in the accuracy of federal statistics, such as the unemployment rate, than in the federal government overall.
A national poll of about 1000 adults conducted by survey research firm SSRS in June found that roughly 70% had at least some confidence in federal statistics, compared with 51% who said the same about the federal government overall.
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers called Trump’s claim that the BLS numbers were manipulated for political purposes “a preposterous charge”, telling ABC that McEntarfer’s firing was “way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did”.
“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number,” said Summers, who led the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton.
Hassett also raised concerns about data quality - questioning whether the system has recovered from the chaos of economic data collection during the Covid pandemic.
He argued that large revisions during the pandemic were happening “all the time, all over the place”, which was understandable given fluctuations in the job market. But after the pandemic, the large revisions have continued, he said.
“Right now, we’ve got BLS numbers that aren’t really a lot better than they were during Covid, and we need to understand why. I think the President’s right to call for new leadership,” Hassett told Fox News.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on CBS that the President’s concerns with the BLS data date back to “everything we saw last year”, appearing to reference downward revisions to the 2024 jobs data that Trump complained about.
“There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways,” Greer continued. “The president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”
The Trump Administration’s push to overhaul major benchmarks it calls flawed predates the jobs report.
In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called for a change in the way economic growth is measured, though that idea has yet to move forward.
Over the past decade, as a result of budget constraints, the BLS has scaled back key activities such as in-person visits, follow-ups, field training and travel - steps that are essential for data quality.
It has said it is surveying fewer outlets for the consumer price index - the most widely used benchmark for inflation - because of staffing shortages in certain cities, and that it is discontinuing the calculation and publishing of wholesale pricing data on hundreds of products in the producer price index.
