Trump Wants 'His Own People' Counting Jobs, Hassett Says

The director of the White House National Economic Council defended President Trump's firing of the official charged with compiling employment data, saying Sunday that the president needs information he can trust. "The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable," Kevin Hassett said on NBC's Meet the Press, the New York Times reports. Others with knowledge of the job said that, despite Trump's accusations, it's not possible for one person to change the numbers gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Erika McEntarfer has posted her response to being fired. Developments include:

• Revisions: Hassett said he was suspicious of the bureau's changes to its job numbers. "If I was running the BLS, and I had a number that was a huge, politically important revision … then I would have a really long report explaining what happened, and we didn't get that," he said. Hassett declined to provide evidence of Trump's claim that the report was rigged. "The revisions are the hard evidence," he said, per the Washington Post.
• 'A preposterous charge': Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary who served in Democratic administrations, said McEntarfer couldn't have altered the data if she wanted to. "These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals," he told ABC News' This Week. "There's no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number."

• Misunderstanding: William Beach, appointed by Trump to the job in his first term, said the president doesn't seem to understand the process, agreeing that McEntarfer couldn't have changed numbers. "The commissioner doesn't do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn't see the numbers until Wednesday before they're published," Beach said on CNN's State of the Union, per Politico. "By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they're all prepared."
• Trump's call: "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, US trade representative Jamieson Greer said on CBS News' Face the Nation, per the Guardian. Regardless, the decision is Trump's, he said: "He can choose who works in the executive branch."

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• 'The honor of my life': McEntarfer, who was a Biden appointee, posted a statement Friday night on Bluesky that did not address Trump's accusations. "It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy," she wrote. "It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation."