Kevin Hassett, Trump's appointee for director of the National Economic Council, told CNN host John Berman the administration is not ready to fully trust the next jobs report numbers due next week, possibly indicating the administration's low expectations.
“Jobs report coming out next week, Kevin. You gonna believe the numbers?” asked Berman.
“There's a lot of work that needs to be done to make it so that the numbers are more reliable,” said Hassett. “The extent to which the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) survey response rates hasn't improved and it made the data very unreliable with huge revisions, is something that we need a new team to have a look at. But I think they'll be as good as they can be. But they need to get a lot better.”
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To that, Berman reminded Hassett that it was the revisions to survey responses that drew the wrath of President Donald Trump and prompted him to fire then Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.
At the time, Trump claimed the commissioner "RIGGED" jobs figures "to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” despite economists saying it was Trump’s own tariffs that hurt labor numbers that month.
“Again, obviously the revisions are the ones that have the greater response rate and it was the revisions that showed very weak numbers,” Berman told Hassett.
Earlier Hassett tried to claim Trump’s attempt to fire Fed board member Lisa Cook and install a White House ally was an attempt to make the fed more independent, not less.
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“I think that the president believes … that this fed hasn't really been independent, that if you look at their movements to let inflation get out of control, to potentially jack up the economy right ahead of the election for Kamala Harris to begin hiking rates the minute President Trump was elected took office in 2017, there was a pretty troubling partisan pattern.”
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