CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman called out Donald Trump’s rationale for firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the government reported weak job numbers.
Trump took aim at Erika McEntarfer on Truth Social, alleging without evidence that she manipulated the data for political reasons. Liesman called this move the president’s attempt to reshape the bureau into state propaganda.
“My concern now is that the president wants to turn the BLS into Pravda!” Liesman said Friday on CNBC’s Power Lunch, referring to the Soviet Union’s communist publication.
“This is the most outrageous charge of politicization that I can remember,” Liesman added.
“There is no context in which these numbers have been revised in a political context. These numbers are revised routinely. It’s not that they can’t be improved and should be improved, but the notion that they have been underreported or revised for political reasons—there’s no statistical evidence of that, and there is no proof of that. And it’s simply untrue.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
BLS data was disappointing on several fronts. It showed that employers added a lower-than-expected 73,000 jobs in July, with unemployment ticking up to 4.2 percent. It also revised down hiring numbers for May and June, lowering the combined total by 258,000 jobs. Instead of 147,000 new jobs in June, for instance, there were only 14,000.
Liesman said it would be “very difficult” for McEntarfer, a career economist whom former President Joe Biden nominated to the post in 2023, to cook the books.
“It would take an absolute army and a massive conspiracy inside the BLS to politicize this data,” he said. “I spent—I think it was three weeks understanding how this number is put together back when the late Jack Welch accused the Obama administration of this. And it’s very difficult to do it.”
Many economic experts have linked the hiring slowdown to tariffs, which the president pressed on with just yesterday by targeting dozens of countries. Switzerland was hit with a 39 percent tariff, for instance, while India’s is at 25 percent and Canada’s remains at 35 percent.
In March, Liesman called his Trump’s whiplash tariff approach “insane‚” and when the president unveiled his “reciprocal” list of tariffs the following month, the CNBC reporter said it “looks like it’s basically resting on made-up numbers.”
In May, following news that the U.S. GDP had contracted by 0.3 percent in the first quarter of the year, Trump blamed his predecessor for economic woes. This excuse, Liesman said, caused “a lot of laughter around Wall Street.”
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