White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett suggested that firing Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) chief Erika McEntarfer over a poor jobs report would lead to future data that was not "propaganda."
During a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Shannon Bream noted that former BLS commissioners had condemned Trump for firing McEntarfer.
"And they said it's not good to cast aspersions on what's being done, because it's a formula," she explained. "It's used the same way every single time."
"They have to get back to ground zero and look at why the numbers have started to be so unreliable," Hassett replied. "So 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. And so I think that the president's right to call for new leadership."
"These numbers are absolutely — in my talk back in 2015, I talked about how the data can't be propaganda," he added. "The data has to be something that you could trust because decision makers throughout the economy trust that these are the data, that they can build a factory because they believe, or cut interest rates because they believe."
"And if the data aren't that good, that it's a real problem for the U.S. And right now the data are, have become very unreliable with these massive revisions over the last few years."
