Top White House officials have started trying to downplay a highly anticipated jobs report set for release on Wednesday, insisting that the U.S. economy remains strong even if the data may ultimately show a fresh slowdown in hiring.
The source of the administration’s concern is the next monthly update from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which will offer a more official look at hiring in January as well as a revised glimpse at the state of U.S. employment over the past year.
Many analysts expect that federal report to show sluggishness in the labor market, echoing a series of unofficial, private-sector gauges in recent weeks, which have found “lackluster” hiring, an uptick in layoffs and little change in the number of new job postings.
For President Trump, a dour jobs report could prove politically noxious, further complicating his work to convince a skeptical electorate that his agenda has yielded meaningful improvements for the economy. To that end, his top aides have fanned the airwaves in a bid to mount an early rebuttal, arguing that a low hiring number for January won’t tell the full story about the labor market at the start of the year.
“We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like,” Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade adviser, said in an interview on Tuesday on Fox Business.
Mr. Navarro said that the U.S. economy had changed markedly under Mr. Trump, specifically pointing to the president’s mass deportations. That, he said, had reduced the number of new jobs that the labor market needed to create and maintain in order to achieve a “steady state.”
Mr. Navarro cautioned that he was “not expecting a weak number” once the B.L.S. releases its figures on Wednesday, adding of the hiring figures generally: “I am just saying that going forward when we see a number under 100,000, we don’t wring our hands.”
Economists are expecting employers to have added around 69,000 jobs in January. Generally, experts agree that the number of new jobs needed to maintain a stable unemployment rate each month has fallen because of the president’s immigration policies.
One day earlier, Kevin Hassett, the president’s top trade adviser, similarly pointed to immigration restriction as one of a few forces expected to depress hiring in January. Appearing on CNBC, Mr. Hassett said the deportations along with the wider adoption of artificial intelligence and economic growth broadly could yield “slightly smaller job numbers.”
Mr. Hassett long has argued that advancements in A.I., in particular, had made workers more productive, likening the boom to the advent of the modern internet. Repeating that view this week, he maintained that greater productivity had helped to boost economic growth, even if employers were not hiring in droves.
Mr. Hassett added that “one shouldn’t panic if you see a sequence of numbers that are lower than you’re used to, because, again, population growth is going down and productivity growth is skyrocketing,” explaining that it was “an unusual set of circumstances.”
Hiring figures, in particular, are a sensitive subject for Mr. Trump. The president has previously questioned the credibility of unfavorable jobs data in the past, and in August, he fired the Senate-confirmed leader of the labor statistics agency for revisions to its past estimates.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.
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