← Videos · Economy, Tariffs & Trade

Kevin Hassett Defends BLS Commissioner Firing, Calls Jobs Data Unreliable on CNBC

August 4, 2025 · CNBC Television · 0:13:08

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett joined CNBC’s Squawk Box on August 4, 2025, days after President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following a weak jobs report. Asked whether he believes the numbers were rigged, as the President said, Hassett answered that as an economist he goes with what he can prove — and what he can prove, he said, is that the data have become very unreliable. He said the revisions released the prior week were so large he first thought they had to be a typo, and that when revisions are bigger than the number itself, as he put it, you know you have trouble, according to his remarks.

Hassett said the White House — OMB and the Council of Economic Advisers — has been working to understand why the data deteriorated, citing response rates among other factors, and argued the bureau needs a fresh set of eyes to modernize labor data so it is transparent and reliable enough for markets to make big bets on, as he stated the goal. The hosts pressed him on credibility, citing Janet Yellen’s banana-republic criticism of the firing, and on who could re-establish the bureau’s credibility, per the exchange in the interview.

Why it matters

The interview is the administration’s substantive defense of the BLS firing — reliability and revisions rather than rigging, in the NEC director’s own formulation — and it is the primary record of that argument on the day it was made.

Sources: CNBC Television, “Watch CNBC’s full interview with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett”, 2025-08-04 (official upload, embedded above; published 2025-08-04). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.