White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Sunday the monthly jobs numbers are “unreliable” and “not keeping up with the economy,” as he suggested overhauling the formula used to calculate the data.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” the National Economic Council director defended President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after this month’s “disappointing” jobs report.
Unemployment ticked up, and employers added just 73,000 jobs in July, and the job gains from May and June were revised down by 258,000.
“When the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then they’re going to be people that wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” Mr. Hassett said.
He said the May and June revisions are the largest in 50 years if you exclude the COVID pandemic years.
“I thought it must be a typo,” Mr. Hassett said, calling the revisions “something of a puzzle” that wasn’t explained well in the report.
“Markets might be as much unsettled by the fact that the data are so noisy,” he said. “So imagine if the revision in the data, sort of the correction of errors, is five times bigger than the number itself. Then that makes you wonder, ‘Well, can I believe this number at all?’ And I think that that’s actually something that needs to be fixed. It needs to be fixed fast.”
Mr. Hassett called for “a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up.” That may involve changing the formulas used to calculate the jobs numbers, which he said he’s warned since 2015 can not keep up with a fast-moving modern economy.
“They have to get back to ground zero and look at why the numbers have started to be so unreliable, and why do the numbers not really pick up the gig economy and so on,” the White House economist said.
The Fox interview focused mostly on the jobs numbers but also touched briefly on trade, after Mr. Trump announced new “reciprocal tariffs” ranging from 15% and 41% that will kick in on Thursday.
Mr. Hassett dismissed a Yale Budget Lab estimate that the new levies will result in an average household income loss of $2,400 in 2025 as a partisan analysis.
Instead, he cited a Congressional Budget Office estimate on the estimated $3 trillion in new tariffs as “something that’s really going to help us balance the budget.”
“And all inflation numbers are lower than they’ve been in five years,” Mr. Hassett. “And so the idea that the tariffs are going to set off inflation and set off a recession is just not in the data.”
Whatever impact the tariffs have on consumers, he said, “will be way less” than the $10,000 the White House Council of Economic Advisors estimates the typical family will net from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“With the economy, it’s really important to keep our eyes on the horizon,” Mr. Hassett said. “And the eyes on the horizon are seeing really smooth sailing ahead. We’ve got 3% GDP growth.”