&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "'We need fresh set of eyes': White House defends Trump's move to fire head of Bureau of Labour Statistics")
Top White House officials defended the move to fire the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics by US President Donald Trump on Sunday (August 3). The White House economic advisers pushed back against the criticism of the American president's action. The critics said that Trump's decision could undermine confidence in official US economic data. The Trade Representative of the US, Jamieson Greer, told CBS that Trump had "real concerns" about the data. At the same time, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said the president "is right to call for new leadership."
Speaking to Fox News, Hassett said that the main concern was Friday's BLS report of net downward revisions showing 258,000 fewer jobs had been created in May and June than previously reported. He said that Trump administration needs "fresh set of eyes.”
The American president accused the BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of faking the jobs numbers without providing any evidence of data manipulation. The BLS compiles the closely watched employment report as well as consumer and producer price data.
The BLS gave no reason for the revised data. But it said that "monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors."
After Trump fired McEntarfer, the concerns around the quality of U.S. economic data published by the federal government came on the heels of a raft of new US tariffs on dozens of trading partners, sending global stock markets tumbling as Trump presses ahead with plans to reorder the global economy.
"I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up," Hassett said on "Fox News Sunday" on August 3.
William Beach, a former BLS commissioner and co-chair of the group Friends of the BLS, criticised Trump's move and said there was no way a commissioner could rig the jobs numbers.
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"Every year we've revised the numbers. When I was commissioner, we had a 500,000 job revision during President Trump's first term," Beach said on CNN's "State of the Union.
"And why do we do that? Because firms are created or firms go out of business, and we don't really know that during the course of our of the year, until we reconcile against a real full count of all the businesses," he added.
