Trump fires US labor official over major job market data revision
Trump's decision to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner is in response to the figures released Friday. They include massive downward corrections of earlier data for the increase in workers in non-farm sectors. He called it "a major mistake."
The bureau corrected the number of jobs created in May from 144,000 to 19,000, and that in June from 147,000 to 14,000. The net downward revision totaled 258,000. The department said the scale of the correction is larger than usual.
Trump wrote in a separate social media post, "In my opinion, today's Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad." He added that job numbers were massively revised downward also right after the presidential election in 2024. He called the revisions "A TOTAL SCAM," without giving evidence of manipulation.
Trump said the bureau chief will be replaced with "someone much more competent and qualified."
The job market statistics is one of the key economic indexes in the US to determine the state of the labor market and business conditions. The Federal Reserve places importance on it to decide its monetary policies.
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