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From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Ketroweth.
This is The Daily. For most Americans, the government's monthly jobs number was a pretty dull statistic.
Until a few days ago, when President Trump angrily fired the person responsible for producing it, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Now, from Washington to Wall Street, everyone's wondering whether you can still trust federal statistics if the president is willing to just get rid of people who give him facts he doesn't like.
Today, I speak with my colleague, Ben Castleman, about how the government's economic data suddenly turned into a national drama.
It's Tuesday, August 5th. Ben, I just want to start by acknowledging that we may be on the brink of the nerdiest daily episode ever, but I am really excited to have you on for this because, honestly, this is kind of your Super Bowl.
I mean, you have made a career of labor numbers, and this time, we didn't just get job numbers.
There was extreme drama around these job numbers.
So I want to get into it. How did this whole fight start?
So every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or the BLS, puts out this big report on jobs, hiring, employment, unemployment from the previous month.
And it is my Super Bowl 12 times a year.
Lucky for you. It's my Super Bowl. It's a Super Bowl for a lot of econ nerds around the country.
And that's because this is, in some ways, the most important single number or single set of numbers that we get about the economy each month.
It matters to regular people, right? This is about whether people have jobs and can find jobs.
It's important to... policymakers at the Federal Reserve who are trying to decide whether they should raise or lower interest rates.
It's a hugely important political number that tells us, as well as any other set of numbers, whether the president is succeeding or failing in his management of the economy.
And so this is a set of numbers that we all sort of drill down on the moment they come out.
They hit the website at 8.30 and we're all sort of frantically refreshing to see what these numbers show.
And this time we refresh the website and it says 73,000 jobs were added in July.
Which is not great. It was weaker than forecasters had anticipated, but it was not a crushing blow.
The numbers are not catastrophic, but they're not great either.
That's right, but with one big caveat, which is that they also revised the jobs for May and for June, the last two months.
And they revised those down by a quarter million jobs.
Hmm. So we thought we had added around 150,000 jobs a month in May and in June, which would have been solid numbers.
We had reacted to them and said, these are great numbers.
Right. Those got revised down to more like 15,000 jobs in each of those two months.
Wow. So all of a sudden, this picture that we had. of the labor market, this labor market that was chugging along, that was resilient, that had shown sort of no signs of cracking despite tariffs and uncertainty and all the other stuff that we've been talking about, all of a sudden it looks like, well, maybe there were deeper cracks than we had realized.
Yeah. The last time that you were on the show, you said this is Trump's economy, right?
He's put his stamp on it with tariffs, with immigration policy.
He owns it if it soars or if it tanks. And you're saying this is the first sign we're maybe getting now that the economy might be wobbling.
Yeah, that's right. And so these numbers come out.
Rick Santelli here with the big breaking news of the morning, the big July job, job, jobs report.
Nonfarm payrolls up 73,000. Definitely a bit light, but... Everybody sort of reacts to them, starts to try to figure out what they mean.
Look, I think this is all a result, this disappointing number is a result of all the turmoil over tariffs and the trade wars.
I think this is more about the Federal Reserve.
Again, we've got a bifurcated economy. And then a few hours later, around two o'clock in the afternoon, the president puts out this post on Truth Social, his social media site.
It's this long post. Natalie, it's like taking up like my full screen here.
Okay, let's hear it. In which he says, quote, I was just informed that our country's, quote, jobs numbers are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McIntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, who faked the jobs numbers before the election to try and boost Kamala's chances of victory.
This is where the drama comes in. This is the drama.
He goes on in this to basically accuse Dr. McIntarfer of rigging the numbers for political reasons. and says that he has directed his team to fire her, which they promptly do.
So it basically looks like he's saying he didn't like the numbers, and so he's firing the person responsible for them.
That's certainly what it looked like to me and I think to most people who were watching this.
But that's not the story that his advisors told when they came out and started giving interviews later on Friday and on the Sunday shows over the weekend.
And joining me now is the director of the White House National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett.
Mr. Hassett, welcome to Meet the Press. It's great to be here.
We saw Kevin Hassett, who's one of his top economic advisors, came out and said, no, no, this isn't that the president didn't like the numbers.
It's that there have been these big revisions.
Well, what we've seen over the last few years is massive revisions to the jobs numbers.
The numbers that are being put out by the BLS are unreliable, and this commissioner was clearly not doing a good job.
Isn't this the very definition of shooting the messenger?
No. Absolutely not. I mean, the bottom line is that there were people involved in creating these numbers.
And if I were running the BLS and I had a number that was a huge politically important revision, actually revision should be smaller, right, because computers are better and so on, then I would have a really long report explaining exactly what happened.
And we didn't get that. He says at one point, to make sure that the data are transparent and as reliable as possible, we're going to get highly qualified people in there that have a fresh start and a fresh set of eyes on the problem.
So is the president prepared to fire anyone who reports data that he disagrees with?
No, absolutely not. The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable.
And if there are big changes and big revisions, we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example, that we want to know why.
We want people to explain it to us. So their version of it is, look, there were these big revisions.
Clearly, we've gotten the numbers wrong.
And so we're going to bring in our own people who are going to do a better job of getting these numbers right.
How unprecedented is this? Like, has it happened before?
It's really unprecedented in the century-long history of the U.S. economic statistics system.
There are some earlier examples along the way that have some parallels here.
If you go back, President Hoover sort of pushed out or retired the equivalent of the BLS commissioner at the time.
Nixon did a version of this as well. But we've never seen anything like this where there's a bad jobs report, the president is mad about it, he fires the head of the statistical agency.
I mean, I don't know, Natalie, you used to be an economics reporter.
Sure did. You've been in this world for a while, but I suspect you can't name a whole lot of commissioners of labor statistics.
Not a one. And most people couldn't either.
This is not a high profile job. Dr. McIntarfer was a longtime civil servant at the Census Bureau and in other agencies.
She's sort of known as a, you know, data nerd's data nerd.
She's not somebody I think you would have ever expected to be the subject of a president's social media post.
And is she crunching the numbers herself?
I mean, I understand you're saying Trump is kind of laying the blame at her feet in a really pointed way.
Yeah. No, very much not. The commissioner is the only political appointee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Everybody else is a career employee, most of whom are there for many years across multiple administrations.
These are the people who collect the data, who crunch the data, who put it together.
And the commissioner doesn't even see the numbers until they are finalized.
And numerous people at the Bureau and who have been at the Bureau in the past have told me there's just no way that a commissioner could futz with these numbers without a whole host of people knowing about it, many of whom would raise heaven and earth to stop them from doing that.
Okay, so I want to actually hear how the numbers are put together.
What's the actual process? So the monthly jobs numbers are based on a survey of more than 100,000 businesses and other employers across some 600,000 work sites in the country.
So, I mean, this can be on the phone, it can be online, there are various methods, but they're asking employers, how many people did you have on payroll during this period?
And how many hours did they work and how much money were they paid?
And those numbers get aggregated together and added up to come up with a jobs number.
But we're trying to measure an enormous $30 trillion economy with 160 million employees.
There's a lot that goes into trying to tabulate those numbers, to try to fill in the missing blanks.
And that first number that comes out that we all pay so much attention to is an estimate.
It's a preliminary estimate. Right, right.
And we update it over time as we get more complete numbers, and sometimes those updates can be pretty substantial.
These are the revisions, right? These are the revisions.
How should we think about those, Ben? Because I'm just wondering, for people who are not intimately familiar with this data set, it may seem odd that there are really dramatic changes to data that is, I mean, you've been saying, so important, right?
Yeah, I think that's completely understandable.
I think if you hear, we thought there were 150,000 jobs added in June, and now we say there are 15,000 jobs added, that you say, well, what good is any of this anyway?
But it's important to understand that there are some reasons for these big revisions.
Like what? As I said, big survey. Not everybody responds to the survey right away.
Over the course of the next two months, more data becomes available, and so we get a more complete read.
And in normal times, this really works pretty well.
You miss a little bit up one month, you miss a little bit down one month, but over time, it pretty much smooths out.
The trick is that at times when the economy is changing a lot, it can be difficult to get a clear read, right?
It may be that those people who didn't respond to the survey the first time don't look like the people who did respond.
Maybe the reason they didn't respond to the survey was that they were scrambling to keep the lights on.
And so they were cutting jobs and they can't even deal with the survey.
Maybe those businesses shut down altogether.
And the reason they didn't respond was not that they hadn't gotten around to it yet, but that they don't exist anymore.
And so once we get all of the information in, we learn, ooh, actually, we did not add as many jobs as we thought.
And so we know that we have a harder time picking up what's happening at turning points of the economy, which is part of why when these numbers came out on Friday, a lot of people said, uh-oh, maybe this suggests that we are at one of these turning points.
Maybe this suggests that the economy is really taking a turn for the worse.
So you have these Trump aides pointing to the revision saying, look, why are these so big?
And what you're saying is one of the reasons they may be so big is that things have just been really volatile recently.
I assume we've seen things that are creating a lot of noise.
They're creating a lot of noise and anything that creates a lot of noise just makes it more difficult to measure the economy in real time.
But just to be clear, is there anything to suggest that these numbers themselves are wrong?
It depends what you mean by wrong. If what you mean is that these numbers are not a perfect reflection of the actual number of jobs in this country, then yes, because all of these numbers are wrong when they first come out.
They're estimates. But they are the best estimates using the best methods that we have available to us.
But remember, the president didn't just say wrong.
He said rigged. He said these numbers were rigged out of political bias against him.
And there's absolutely no evidence for that.
But I think that that suggestion by the president is what has so many people so alarmed right now.
We'll be right back. I'm Emily Badger. I'm a reporter with The New York Times.
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So you said, Ben, that this has a lot of people alarmed.
Just explain to me why this matters so much to so many people.
It matters because it gets to the real core of how we understand our economy. and to the credibility of the U.S. government.
And I think we have seen in history what happens when that confidence is eroded.
Not so much in this country, but in other countries.
You know, the canonical example of this I think is Argentina where in the earlier part of this century, they fired the people responsible for putting out their inflation numbers when the inflation numbers were higher than they wanted, which certainly sounds a little bit familiar right in this moment.
And then kept putting out low inflation numbers that were just not credible to anyone.
They were not credible to anyone in the country and they were not credible to anybody outside of the country to the point that the international community basically stopped paying any attention to Argentina's official inflation numbers altogether.
And that had real consequences in Argentina.
You know, they were borrowing money internationally and investors basically started charging a higher premium to lend them money because they didn't trust the inflation numbers and they didn't trust the government.
And that contributed to a really crippling debt crisis and default in Argentina.
Yeah. Investors were basically saying, we don't trust that you have a handle on this.
There's no yardstick that we can really point to and know that it's real.
If you lie to your bank about your income, they're probably not going to give you a very good rate on your mortgage.
Sure. And that's basically what we're talking about here.
We saw this in Greece as well, where the government fudged the numbers on their deficit for years to try to meet certain European Union targets. which eventually led to a massive debt crisis there.
And what's worse, when they brought in an economist to run their statistical agency to kind of clean things up, and he told the truth about what the numbers were, that ran afoul of the authorities there, and they criminally prosecuted him.
For years, he's still fighting those cases.
Okay, you've given us these two examples, Ben, where it seems pretty clear that the governments in these two cases were deliberately obscuring a very bad economic reality.
But is that happening here? Like, is that what we're headed for?
Well, so it's certainly not where we are now.
All of our evidence is that the data that's been put out by the administration so far is as trustworthy as ever.
And the person who's in charge of the BLS now, who took over on an acting basis after the commissioner was pushed out, he's a longtime civil servant.
He's very widely and well-regarded. I don't think there's any suggestion that he would cook the books.
And as we discussed before, right, the numbers are actually produced by this legion of civil servants beneath the surface.
And there's no reason to think that any of them are going to change the way they do things either.
Right. I think the concern is the president's going to name a new commissioner.
We don't know who that is yet. Maybe it will be somebody extremely qualified.
I will say that the person who ran the BLS in Trump's first term, a man named Bill Beach, was very widely regarded.
He has come out and condemned this firing.
But if somebody like him is put into place again, I think that a lot of these concerns will be mitigated to a degree.
But I think the idea is out there now. And the concern is that if the president can fire one person for putting out numbers he doesn't like, maybe he fires another.
And maybe we end up in a situation where this keeps going until he gets numbers that he likes.
You're saying basically that either way, Trump has at the very least created the impression that he's willing to fire you if you produce numbers that are not what he wants to see.
I guess my question has been, should we really expect him to appoint somebody who comes in and then just kind of revises the numbers way upward?
Like, wouldn't that be extremely obvious?
No one would trust that. Yeah, I mean, look, in theory, right, he could appoint some longtime loyalist to come in who just says, like, from now on, we added 250,000 jobs a month.
I mean, something sort of very Soviet, right?
And I don't think that's likely. It would be extremely obvious.
Sure. I'm not predicting anything. You and I may be sitting here in six weeks' time talking about that scenario, but I'm not predicting that.
You're not there yet. I'm not there. I think there's another version of this, though, that is a little bit softer, but I think is in some ways just as concerning, where...
The president brings in somebody who maybe isn't an obvious yes man, but who doesn't uphold the traditions of these agencies.
And that that leads over time to a diminishment of staff morale, to increased turnover.
You know, a lot of these people who work in these places have been there for a long time.
They don't necessarily make that much money.
We've already seen a lot of turnover. And that it just eats away at the – and ultimately at the quality of these numbers to a point that people just sort of lose faith in them as being useful gauges of the economy anymore.
And, you know, I don't think it's lost on anybody that this is a pattern that has played out in a lot of places within the federal government. under this president.
You know, we've seen this in the sciences and in health, in the EPA, and we haven't seen that in this way at the statistical agencies yet, but it doesn't take that much to imagine it happening.
Okay, Ben, we've been talking about the rhetoric, about the battle over this data, but I want to now just turn back to the data itself.
Give me a really clear-eyed analysis of what these numbers say about where we are economically right now.
Give us our bearings. So I think you alluded at the beginning of the episode here, right, to the last time we talked, and we talked about how this was Trump's economy now, but there really wasn't much evidence that these policies, tariffs and immigration and uncertainty and all of this were really hurting the economy in a significant way.
I think we can't say that anymore. That's not just because of the jobs numbers.
It's also because of some of the numbers that we got on consumer spending last week, that we've gotten on business investment.
We've started to see some signs that various policies that the president has adopted are starting to sort of eat away at the momentum in the economy.
But We also still are in a place where we are not seeing sort of deep chasms forming in the economy.
The unemployment rate is still low. We're not in a recession.
And very few forecasters that I talk to think that we're headed for one anytime imminently.
And so although the data that we got last week suggests that the economy is in worse shape than we had known going into it, I don't know that it changes the sort of fundamental story of an economy that has proved pretty resilient but faces a lot of challenges.
Huh. That is so interesting and honestly quite surprising, given that we've just spent all this time talking about the intense backlash from Trump that these numbers elicited.
Yeah, in some ways, this is why the president's reaction on Friday was so surprising.
Beyond the shock of what he was doing, it just... seems sort of disproportionate to the actual reality of the news.
Let's just start with these numbers because the figure that we got, that was below all estimates in the Bloomberg survey of economists.
You know, in the initial hours after the report came out... We've seen positive job growth, for sure, and they've been for the American workforce, native-born workers.
A lot of the president's aides were, you know, out on TV and they were doing their usual thing.
They were doing their usual sort of spin about how these numbers weren't really so bad.
You know, a lot of that data comes pre one big, beautiful bill.
Now that we have one big, beautiful bill and we have a better sense of where the taxes are going, I think we're going to see a much we're going to see more investment.
And like you said, it's a relatively small number.
So I don't I don't read. And, you know, they were making a pretty good bill. case.
There was certainly a lot of softness in these numbers.
There's no getting around that. These were not the numbers the White House was hoping for.
But we've been hearing a lot about uncertainty of the last few months, but that's all resolved now.
So it's all going to get much, much better from here.
There were plenty of arguments you could make for why they weren't really so terrible.
And I think on some basic level, what we're left with here is this economy in stasis where companies aren't really firing workers, but they're not really hiring them yet either, where consumers are still spending and sales are still there, but companies are reluctant to make big investments, big bets that that's going to continue going forward.
Some of that may be because of tariffs. Some of that may be because of immigration.
Some of that may be because of just sort of the general chaos of the first six months of the year.
Right. There's clearly some real uncertainty about where the economy goes from here.
But beneath all of the noise, beneath all of the drama, as you put it, from Friday, we have an economy that based on the numbers is still growing. relatively okay and if we were just talking about the numbers instead of the people responsible for producing them natalie i'm not sure we would be having this conversation today well ben that said it was great to have you on the show thanks for having me We'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to know today.
While Texas are waiting for relief, Republican leaders are redrawing maps to silence voters, hijack our democracy.
The Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas on Sunday achieved their goal of preventing a major redesign of congressional maps in the state for now.
Without a two-thirds quorum, the Texas legislature could not hold a vote on the new maps, which Republicans hope will flip five seats from Democrats to GOP control.
President Trump had called for the redrawing of the districts in order to lock in Republican control over the House in the next midterm elections.
But the Texas statehouse speaker said that the vote was just on hold and wouldn't be prevented from going through.
I will immediately sign the warrants for the civil arrests of the members who have said they will not be here.
He also issued civil arrest warrants for Democrats who left the state.
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas said on Monday that he ordered state law enforcement to detain and return any member who, quote, abandoned their duty to Texans.
He also threatened to try to remove the missing Democrats from their posts.
I believe they have forfeited their seats in the state legislature because they're not doing the job they were elected to do.
And in what officials are calling the largest environmental settlement ever won by a U.S. state, three major chemical companies agreed on Monday to pay New Jersey $875 million to settle claims linked to pollution from so-called forever chemicals.
There are nearly 15,000 of those chemicals in existence, and they're found in things like nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing, and stain-resistant carpets.
And they've been linked to low birth weight, birth defects, and increased risk of some cancers.
The New Jersey attorney general said the state had some of the highest levels of those chemicals in the country.
Under the deal, the companies, Chemours, DuPont, and Corteva, have to fund the cleanup of four former industrial sites, which were once used to manufacture components for explosives, as well as dyes and refrigerants.
Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Claire Tenesketter, and Michael Simon-Johnson.
It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Liz O. Balin, with help from Mike Benoit.
Research help by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Rowan Nemistow, and was engineered by Chris Wood.
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonder League.
That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittroweth.
See you tomorrow. Are you ready to get spicy?
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It's time for something that's not too spicy.
Try Doritos Golden Sriracha. Spicy. But not too spicy.
