Former Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) specialist William Beach–Trump nominee– Jobs Chart President Donald Trump Praise Thursday was wrong in the Oval Office.
Still painful in last week’s “manipulation” work report, which showed more than expected work growth, with Trump calling an impromptu press conference Thursday night to show what he called “new numbers.”
Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore said in a press conference that these numbers justify Trump Dismissal of former BLS Chief Erika Mcentarfer. He estimates that in the last two years of President Joe Biden’s administration, the BLS overestimated 1.5 million jobs that created jobs.
In an interview wealth, Moore said he disagreed with the president’s intentional manipulation. He explained that he had never met Mcentarfer, but said the “suspicious” work numbers were eventually published before the election.
This suspicion forms the basis of the chart Moore brought to the Oval Office, which shows three bars: benchmark revisions, monthly revisions, and overall estimated work growth from 2024.
Moore said he’s famous for 30 years, calling him “good friend” and the beach calls the numbers “the strangest thing in the world.”
“He should know better than doing this,” Haichi said.
The beach found the whole problem.
Beach said the first bar was marked as a work revision in August, a preliminary estimate that later dropped in February, meaning the numbers on the chart didn’t match the formal final number.
Moore refuted that beach misunderstood his approach. Instead of simply making the final August correction, the team is comparing the initial “title” work numbers, the final revisions released each month and the figures for benchmarks, and summarizing the differences.
The beach also believes that the benchmark revision graph on the chart is incorrect and does not match the data published by the BLS. The last bar marked “total revisions” was mathematically flawed, he said, because it added benchmark revisions to the monthly revisions, even though the benchmarks already incorporated these monthly changes, like “like the same apple twice and pretend you have two changes.”
Moore rejected the idea that it was a double count, saying he was capturing separate steps in the revision process.
Additionally, at the press conference, Moore said the income figures came from unpublished Census Bureau data. The beach said it made them unverified. Moore told wealth His team developed an algorithm to estimate the amount of these revenues in advance, with his claim of 97% accuracy and plans to release a report explaining the method.
Perhaps the biggest disagreement between two long-term friends is philosophical. Although Moore claimed he did not believe the numbers were manipulated, he also said Biden “raised his eyebrows” to actively modify and encouraged the president to argue that the BLS was corrupt.
The beach cannot understand this conspiracy. When he led BLS from 2019 to 2023, he saw in person the decentralized nature of the process, as well as the “hardhead” loyalty of statistics that involved hundreds of data. Everyone in the BLS role has such a special job, it’s hard to imagine how they can work together to push their working data in one direction or another.
“I mean, one person at BLS specializes in drinking space data,” Beach said with a smile.
The beach said Trump’s suspicion was not only confusing. They are also “very dangerous”. He said the market relies so heavily on trust in work report data that Trump’s words and actions may have been damaged.
Using his experience in the private sector, he explained that uncertainty in certain metrics forces business leaders to expand their “fault range” when making investments, which could kill the deal. He warned that if companies doubt the accuracy of federal statistics, they will eventually turn to other measures.
Instead of blaming the messenger or sowing unnecessary suspicion, the beach emphasizes that many of the problems with statistics can be solved by modernization.
“I served as the chief statistician of the United States and BLS commissioner for two years,” Haech said. “So I know how the system was weakened and because of the lack of attention and lack of modernization in Congress, the system was weakened over time. So there’s a lot to do.”
He hopes Moore can find opportunities to better explain his statistical differences. Moore has been building numbers in different ways, and Beach says he benefits from it.
“Sometimes, he wasn’t really involved in a topic at the time, and that was important to him,” Haech said. “And I think it’s a good example.”
