The massive downward revisions to U.S. job growth that led President Donald Trump to fire the head of the agency that reported the numbers can be explained by a rapidly slowing economy and job market amid Trump’s trade and immigration policies – not data manipulation, forecasters say.
Trump on Aug. 1 fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after the agency reported a disappointing 73,000 job gains for July, and more significantly, revised down payroll growth for May and June by an outsize 258,000.
That marked the largest two-month revision ever outside of recessions, Goldman Sachs said. It left monthly job gains averaging an anemic 35,000 from May through July.
“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can't be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump said on Truth Social. He added that “today's jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
But forecasters said the revisions actually clear up a disparity between surprisingly resilient job gains and other economic indicators, such as gross domestic product, that have been feeble this year.
