White House officials rush to defend Trump after shaky economic week

The Guardian

2 days ago

Donald Trump administration officials fanned out on Sunday's US political shows to defend the president's policies after a bruising week of poor economic, trade and employment numbers that culminated with the firing of labor statistics chief Erika McEntarfer.
US trade representative Jamieson Greer said Trump has 'real concerns' about the jobs numbers that extend beyond Friday's report that showed the national economy added 73,000 jobs in July, far below expectations. Job growth numbers were revised down by 285,000 for the two previous months as well.
On CBS News's Face the Nation, Greer defended Trump's decision to fire McEntarfer, a respected statistician, saying: 'You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers. There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways.'
He added: 'The president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.'
But William Beach, who served as Trump's commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in his first presidency, warned that McEntarfer's dismissal would undermine confidence in the quality of US economic data.
The BLS gave no reason for the revised data but noted that 'monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors'.
'This is damaging,' Beach said on Sunday on CNN's State of the Union. 'I don't know that there's any grounds at all for this firing.
'And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS.'
McEntarfer on Friday published a statement on social media reacting to her dismissal, calling it the 'honor my life' to have served as BLS commissioner.
She said the BLS employs 'many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy'.
'It is vital and important work, and I thank them for their service to this nation,' McEntarfer's statement on the Bluesky platform said.
Uproar over McEntarfer's firing has come as a series of new tariff rates are due to come into effect this month. While the president has predicted a golden age for the US economy, many economists warn that higher import tariffs could ultimately weaken American economic activity.
On CBS, Greer said that Trump's tariff rates are 'pretty much set' and unlikely to be re-negotiated before they come into effect.
The first six months of Trump's second terms have been characterized by a seesawing of tariff rate announcements that earned the president the moniker on Wall Street of Taco – 'Trump always chickens out'. But last week he issued an executive order outlining tariff modifications for dozens of countries after he had twice delayed implementation.
Yet Greer also said many of the tariff rates announced 'are set rates pursuant to deals'.
'Some of these deals are announced, some are not, others depend on the level of the trade deficit or surplus we may have with the country,' he said.
On NBC's Meet the Press, the national economic council (NEC) director, Kevin Hassett, said modified US tariff rates were now 'more or less locked in, although there will have to be some dancing around the edges about exactly what we mean when we do this or that'.
Asked if tariff rates could change again, he said, 'I would rule it out because these are the final deals.'
On Fox News Sunday, Hassett said he also supported McEntarfer's dismissal. 'I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,' he remarked.
But former treasury secretary Larry Summers told ABC's This Week that McEntarfer's firing was 'way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did', alluding to the late former president who resigned in 1974 over the Watergate scandal.
Summers said Trump's claim that the poor job numbers were 'phony' and designed to make him look bad 'is a preposterous charge'.
'These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,' Summers said. 'There's no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number. The numbers are in line with what we're seeing from all kinds of private sector sources.'
Summers placed McEntarfer's firing, Trump's pressure on Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, to lower interest rates, and the strong-arm tactics that the administration has aimed at universities, law firms and media institutions in the same bucket.
'This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism,' Summers said. 'Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers.
'It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.'