President Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “over the next three, four days” after he fired the head of the agency last week over a gloomy jobs report.
Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring last month. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.
Ms. McEntarfer had worked as a government economist for decades and was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote last year. Mr. Trump gave no further details about the announcement of her replacement.
Earlier Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of the jobs report.
Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been manipulated to hurt him politically.
“The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Mr. Hassett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted.”
In a second appearance, on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”
Since Ms. McEntarfer’s sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s actions threaten to pollute the nonpartisan work at B.L.S. to measure the trajectory of the economy.
Her dismissal came only hours after the statistics agency reported the slowdown in hiring in July, on top of two substantial downward revisions to its previous estimates of job growth in May and June.
While the revision was large, such updates are not out of the ordinary, though Mr. Trump still claimed on social media that the numbers “were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
“So you know what I did?” Mr. Trump later told reporters, “I fired her, and you know what? I did the right thing.”
Mr. Trump also pointed to past revisions to the jobs data, specifically a report last August that showed employers added roughly 818,000 fewer jobs over a 12-month period than previously believed. Mr. Trump claimed the revision was made “right after the election,” though it actually occurred about two and a half months before the vote.
In his appearance on Fox, Mr. Hassett once again cited that “massive revision” as a source of concern and suspicion, this time saying it came “after Joe Biden had dropped out,” referring to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“When the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” he said.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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