Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said during a “Morning Joe” interview Thursday that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) used “corrupted” data leading to massive mistakes in initial job estimates.
The BLS reported only 73,000 jobs were created in July, while figures from May and June were revised downward despite Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growing by 3% in the second quarter, leading President Donald Trump to fire Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer. Bessent compared the errors in the BLS to a plane flying off course.
“I think that this was long overdue. I mean, the mistake that they made last week was a five to six standard deviation mistake,” Bessent told “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski. “This is like if you got on a plane in Miami, thought you were going to New York and landed in Denver. I mean, so I actually think that cleaning up the BLS was something that should have been done long ago.”
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A standard deviation is a measure of variability in how far a set of figures is from the average, according to Math.net. The Biden administration admitted in August 2024 that it overestimated job creation by over 800,000 jobs.
“You know, Mika, the other thing I can tell you is that, like, there’s something wrong here because on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve voted not to cut rates. On Friday, the BLS had this massive downward revision. One of these is mistaken,” Bessent told Brzezinski. “So either the Fed economist did not see what the BLS did [or] the BLS data was corrupted and you know, I can tell you that like the BLS in government, we have settled for so much mediocrity across the government.”
“BLS in many of their cells, the things that they fill in… they used to have 100% the surveys. Some of them, they’re just down to 30% of actual data and then they’re intuiting or imputing the other data,” Bessent continued. “So, like, this is a long-needed change. And, you know, the head of BLS is responsible for this.”
“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough questioned Bessent as to the evidence for the BLS getting numbers wrong.
“This was the biggest revision, I believe, in 30 years,” Bessent responded. “And this again, it’s a five standard deviation miss. You didn’t land in Newark[, New Jersey,] instead of New York, you landed in Denver. And that if the employers aren’t providing this, then the BLS, it was incumbent on the BLS to find a new way of collecting data. You know, it just strikes me as very lazy work trying to do things the same old way and expect a different result.”
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