KRISTEN WELKER: And joining me now is the director of the White House National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett. Mr. Hassett, welcome to Meet the Press.
KEVIN HASSETT: It's great to be here. Thank you.
WELKER: It's great to have you here. Let's start with President Trump's decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, who he accused of manipulating job numbers. Mr. Hassett, what evidence does the administration have that she manipulated the jobs numbers?
HASSETT: Right. Well, what we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers. 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 the typical monthly revision often was bigger than the number itself. And now we had a number that just came out, the actual number for the month wasn't so bad. But the two months before were revised down by more than it ever happened since 1968. And in 2015, Alan Greenspan and I were asked to attend a conference at BLS where we were asked to give advice about how to modernize the data. And we warned that if they didn't try to let the data collection and calculation keep up with the data that was happening in the economy that we would have problems like this. And, finally, in the U.K. they had a very similar problem. And in 2023, they had to for a while shut down the data agency of the U.K. for the same kinds of problems.
WELKER: But just to be very clear, do you have – does the administration have any evidence that it was “rigged,” as the president said? And will you be presenting that to the American public?
HASSETT: Well, the evidence is that there have been a bunch of revisions that could --
WELKER: But hard evidence?
HASSETT: Well, I mean, the revisions are hard evidence. There- for example, there was an 800,000 re- an 18- 818,000 revision making the Joe Biden job record a lot worse that came out after he withdrew from the presidential campaign. There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder. And I think 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.
