National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told “FOX News Sunday” that massive downward revisions to official jobs numbers for the past few months are a “puzzle,” and “a fresh set of eyes” is needed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics to figure out what’s really going on. “With the economy, it’s really important to keep our eyes on the horizon,” Hassett started. “We are seeing really smooth sailing ahead. We’ve got 3 percent GDP growth. And, yes, this week, a disappointing jobs number.” “But when I first saw the big revisions… I thought it must be a typo,” he said. “I’ve been following this forever. I’ve never seen a revision like that.” “The big downward revision is something of a puzzle,” he explained. “I don’t think it was explained very well. And I think that markets might be as much unsettled by the fact that the data are so noisy.” “Imagine if the revision in the data showed the correction of errors is five times bigger than the number itself. Then that makes you wonder, well, can I believe this number at all?” “That’s actually something that needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed fast,” Hassett said. FOX News Sunday host Shannon Bream asked about the president’s reaction, calling the numbers “phony” and firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people who wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” Hassett said. “If you look back to just a year ago, for example, there was another massive revision from the BLS, almost a million jobs, a million jobs down, that said that the Joe Biden jobs record was a lot worse than people thought, but we didn’t get the downward revision until after Joe Biden had dropped out. And so it, once again, it made people think, what are they doing?” “If I were running the BLS and I had the biggest downward revision in 50 years, I would have a really, really detailed report explaining why it happened so that everybody really trusted the data,” he said. “But instead, they have this little black box that moves the numbers around and makes people wonder, sometimes with partisan patterns.” “So, I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up.” “Going back to 2015, when I was the keynoter along with Alan Greenspan, on how to modernize this place, I worried about how the changing, modern economy was going to move faster than their ability to measure,” he said. “And I think now I’m being kind of proven true, the numbers are not keeping up with the economy.” “You know, get back to ground zero and look at why the numbers have started to be so unreliable. And, you know, why do the numbers not really pick up the gig economy and so on.” “The data can’t be propaganda. The data has to be something that you can trust because decision makers throughout the economy trust that these are the data, that they can build a factory or cut interest rates because they believe,” he said. “If the data aren’t that good, then it’s a real problem for the U.S.”
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