How would you describe the last three months since we last spoke?

Tiring tiring

Michael Weider has good reason to be tired. He runs the baby and toddler supply company Lalo, which has been hit by President Donald Trump's tariffs. Most of their supply chain is in China. They've had to raise prices to keep up. But Michael says their core customers have stuck with them. And now that the early chaos of Trump's tariff policy has calmed down a bit, he can at least try to plan for the future.

We're looking longer term. I think we have a lot more clarity than we did.

While on Friday, Trump made a move that could complicate that clarity.

We do have breaking news, President Trump has ordered the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her.

'The firing came right after the release of less-than-stellar jobs data for July and big revisions for May and June. All bad news for Trump's economic agenda, and particularly irksome for someone who campaigned on reining in inflation and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The move had some wondering. Was he removing the messenger just because he didn't like the message? If so, history shows that's a page right out of the authoritarian playbook. Former BLS commissioner William Beach, nominated by Trump in his first term, was not a fan of the move.

I said groundless, I don't think there's any grounds at all for this firing and it really hurts the statistical system.

And business owners like Michael know that even the appearance of politics in federal reports could make them harder to trust.

I think it makes people work harder to find their source of truth, potentially. And I think that's been a trend is like, everybody is like in business is working way more now because it creates more and more uncertainty, which creates more work, more and pressure and clarity is the key to running business.

And you would think that the US government would be a gold source of data, one spot that people could rely on time and time again.

Yeah, good and bad, right? Like I don't think we should shy away or sugarcoat data just to make people feel good. Like people feel the reality.

My guest today is CNN chief domestic correspondent and anchor Phil Mattingly. We're gonna talk about why so many find this firing so concerning and why the reality of America's economic data might actually be a good thing for Trump. From CNN, this is one thing. I'm David Rind. We're back in a bit.

So Phil, when President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, on Friday, there was a huge outcry. Even some Republicans who were normally on Trump's side were skeptical. Senator Cynthia Loomis called it kind of impetuous. With all due respect to Dr. McEntarfers, she's not exactly a household name. So can you just explain why this move provoked such an extreme response?

Because it was nonsensical. And I want to preface with, I'm not someone who really gets spun up about whatever the latest shiny object is. And that's saying a lot, I think, in this day and age. But I think it underscores the sensitivity of this particular action and why I think it matters a lot. Why do you see people like Cynthia Lummis, who I don't know that has ever gone against President Trump, so publicly came out and was kind of scratching your head.

All right, we do have breaking news, big economic news, new jobs numbers in just minutes ago. Let's get right to CNN's Matt Egan for the details here. 73,000, that's a miss, but it only tells part of the story.

The reason that the president fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is because he didn't like the jobs numbers, and particularly didn't liked the downward revisions, which were substantial in the July jobs report, which made the two months prior look significantly weaker in the employment situation than anybody thought going into that month.

June was revised sharply lower. Previously, the government had estimated that the economy added 147,000 in June. This new estimate is just 14,000. That is a very weak number, John. That's actually the weakest month of job growth since December of 2020 during COVID.

'The reality is the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, Dr. McIntarfer, had no hand in the final numbers at all. It is not her job to decide the numbers. It's not her to survey the numbers, it's not job to actually compile all the numbers She doesn't even see the numbers until two days before the numbers come out. Oh, so it arrives on her desk after it's all been done. Yes, by career officials, by careers statisticians. And I think part of the The importance of U.S. Economic data and why it's referred to as the gold standard by Fed Chairman Jay Powell, by foreign economists and domestic economists alike, is because it has long been insulated from any type of political bias. It is compiled in a non-partisan, apolitical, rather arduous and somewhat painful way, but a way that the entire world utilizes and relies upon as kind of the baseline for any other economic data that's coming out, whether public or private.

Well, so for those unfamiliar, this idea of revising previous month numbers, that's normal.

'Yes, and this might seem counterintuitive, but it's actually a positive thing, because what they're trying to do over time is to kind of simplify it a little bit. The way they do things is they are surveying employers and surveying households over the course of a three-month period. The first month is the initial data that they've gotten back. As they get more data in the second month, then they revise that to make their data more accurate. In the third month, they get the most fulsome data. And that is considered the final revision, which would be the most accurate data. So you want them to revise. They're revising because they have better numbers. They're revising because they had more fulsome data. The revisions are actually a sign of competence, a sign of better data, a side of they're working to ensure that policymakers, in particular, have the best data to work off of. It's not a sign that they've failed. It's a sign something's gone wrong. It's certainly not a side a politics. It's the sign of their process, a process that's been in place for decades, is actually working.

Mr. President, why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

Because I think her numbers were wrong. Just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election. Days before the elections, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala. I guess...

So Trump's main gripe here is that he believes the job numbers were altered last year, right around the election, to benefit Kamala Harris. Is there any truth to that?

There isn't, and I think one of the interesting things is, first off, let's be clear. He's attacked jobs data that he doesn't like since his first term. That in and of itself is not an anomaly for him. He took particular issue with one significant annual revision that was made last year.

The U.S. Added 818,000 fewer jobs than previously expected. That's according to the latest revision from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was the most significant downward revision on an annual basis at any point since 2009 when Barack Obama was president. The Obama administration did not attack it as being politically biased. In fact, going into that revision, which again was an annual revision, not a monthly revision, the expectation was actually it would be revised downward over a million jobs. So it actually fell underneath expectations. But that was utilized by the Trump campaign as some type of evidence that this has all been rigged against the Trump administration.

I want to address the massive scandal around the revised job numbers that were just announced this morning, a little while ago, just before I came up, I got to see them. And it really isn't a revision, it's a total lie, total lie.

And I remember I was at the rally right after this release came out and he went off on a rant on it.

So they said they existed, and they never did exist. They built them up so that they could say, what a wonderful job they're doing. We've never had numbers like this.

'My point of time is a downward revision of jobs in the middle of the campaign season benefits him politically no matter what. It doesn't have to be rigged. He doesn't need to attack the people that are putting the numbers together. It has no bearing on what's happening. He just decided to do it. I think the concern here, and I think this gets more to the macro impact, is calling into question, bringing doubt, pulling on threads of things that people don't understand like revisions, because they shouldn't. People have normal lives and probably aren't super focused on what the BLS is doing day-to-day. All it does is raise, you know, put in quotes, the air quotes, I'm just asking questions. And when you start asking questions and you start to question the relevance, we start to questions the methodology behind this data, all of a sudden you start opening the door to situations that the U.S. Really, really doesn't want to be dealing with. Gave that up for me, like what? So, you now, if you're Greece and you're basically falsifying your inflation data and deficit data for the better part of a decade, and then all of a sudden it turns out that you were falsifying your deficit data and you have a massive, massive budget gap, you get what we saw, I think, or 2011, 2010, all the years are combining at this point in time, but a massive massive bailout situation for Greece. Argentina, nobody believed their data for a significant period of time. The role the U.S. Plays in particular as kind of the cornerstone of the global economic system, whether it be the dollar, whether it the stability of all global financial markets, whether it be the data that everybody relies upon and kind of bases their own data operations off of, you start calling that into question and you start running into situations where people are starting to doubt the credit worthiness, the stability of the United States system. And that's just a place you don't, history shows going down that path doesn't end well for the country that's targeted.

Well, so we're still waiting to see who Trump is going to appoint. There's an interim commissioner at the moment, but would bringing on someone new, handpicked, actually have an impact on the numbers? You just told me that the commissioner doesn't have anything to do with the generating of the number.

I mean, the short answer based on kind of all of my experience with this is no, it shouldn't. How much say did you have over what the final numbers were going to be when you saw them on Wednesday to the Friday when they were released?

Well, I think zero is the upper bound of that response.

You know i was talking to president trump's appointee for commissioner in his first term he made the point he's like look man it was impossible for until they trusted me i didn't really get access to any of this information until i absolutely had to have it

the doors one time so I couldn't get in before they knew I was going to be okay. They locked the door so I could get into any of their offices of this group, the 40, they're putting it together.

It is a group of 40 people, really, who have access to this information in the lead up to the release until that Wednesday. On Wednesday, the commissioner gets to see it and gets to review it. On Thursday, the White House gets to review and see it, obviously not for public release. And then on Friday morning at 8 30 AM sharp, that's when it's released. So based on how the process currently works, no, it doesn't really matter who he appoints to this position once the Senate confirms them. I think the question becomes, does that person come in and say, well, we got to redo everything and change everything. And then I think you run into a situation where these are career officials who believe very deeply in what they have to do, and you start seeing mass resignations, you start to seeing people leave, and all of a sudden you can't put any of the data together at all.

Right, so in that scenario, it'd be pretty obvious if Trump was trying to put his thumb on the scale.

And I think the irony of all this is that there are methodological issues with this data. This has been growing. Concern about this in good faith concern and good faith debate about how to make the data collection process for BLS, for the Commerce Department, and their data operations has been ongoing for several years now, particularly in the wake of COVID. The response rate has dropped pretty dramatically. It has made it harder to collect data. The efficiency within which they collect data has also been questioned. Not on a political basis, just in a like, how does this actually work? Is there a way to be doing it better? Those debates are difficult to actually bring to an outcome because they've been faced with staff freezes, they've faced with budget cuts on a pretty regular basis over the course of the last several administrations. And so it's not about who the person at the top is, it's, are you funding these agencies? Are you ensuring their staff? That's a legitimate debate that should be had, and I think everybody would acknowledge has to be had at this point in time. It has nothing to do with the person who's actually running the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I guess we should talk about the data itself briefly though, because this is all happening at a very complex economic moment. The last time you were on this show back in April, we talked about the immediate fallout of Trump's Liberation Day tariffs. Markets were freaking out, consumers and businesses were making plans. But then like 48 hours later, Trump had put everything on pause. He said the bond markets were getting yippy and everyone breathed this big sigh of relief. But now a few months later, these tariffs are coming back. What should we know?

Humility is a good thing. I think that's what we should know. And I think I've covered economics for 15 years and I think this has repeatedly happened, I think, in the course of my coverage of these areas of don't assume you know exactly what's going to happen. Everybody thought the tariffs were gonna be the end of the world. Everybody thought, as we were talking about with the bond market before the April 9th pause of the Liberation Day tariffs, which are now more or less in effect. That it was going to be a dramatic drag on economic growth. It would have a significant impact on the US employment system. The US economy would start to show cracks very quickly. None of that has happened up to this point, which is funny in the wake of this current moment, because the data has actually been great for the administration almost across the board and has allowed them to spike the football on their tariffs, even though they've been kind of on a delay for the last couple of months. And say, you guys were all wrong. Everybody was predicting doom. And you were wrong. Turns out we were right the entire time. I think the reality is, Jay Powell probably has the best outlook on this. The Federal Reserve Chairman. When he says, this was just last week at the last Fed meeting, we said, we're still in the early stages of this. And there are a lot of countries right now who are trying to figure out where they are in this moment as they try and make deals or if they try to price in where everything is. So uncertainty starting to clear up. But the actual outcome going forward and the months ahead, I think, is really to be determined. It kind of emphasizes the importance of data. What's interesting, I think in this moment, as we look at the data, is going into the jobs report, anybody you ask would say, look, the employment right now situation in the United States is very solid, very solid and somewhat robust in terms of 120, 130,000 jobs every single month. That is a good number to hold on to, given all of the kind of turmoil that's been going on. Now, I think people are pausing and saying, all right, maybe it's a little bit weaker than we thought. It's not devastating, it's not catastrophic, it's the predictions of doom that we saw in early April, but it is a level of weakness that I think will force policymakers, particularly over at the Federal Reserve, to rethink maybe how they are operating with their dual mandate going forward.

Interesting. Beyond economics though, this whole kerfuffle over the BLS commissioner is just the latest, but perhaps the most extreme attempt by the Trump administration to maybe rewrite narratives that it doesn't like. This is a big question, but you are our chief domestic correspondent after all. What does it mean for the country going forward if there is legitimate reason to suspect that what is being put forward by the federal government is being shaped by partisan ideology and not fact?

I mean, I think, again, this is one of those moments where I'm cautious not to proclaim the absolute worst case. This is Banana Republic. We are heading down a path that you can never recover from types of moments. I do think that these are situations where camel's noses under the tent are problematic and taken together. Signal a direction that the United States has taken great pains and gone to great to avoid for good reason. And that good reason is you can read centuries of economic history. You can read centuries of history in general about what happens when people start to not go by data, not go buy facts, but just go by narratives, just go buy political ideology.

'We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government and, indeed, the private sector and our military.

His administration is purged from a number of Department of Defense websites and other government sites, specific references to the struggles and accomplishments of black Americans, gay and lesbian and transgender Americans, and trailblazing women who fought for equality among many other groups. And I think that there are more...

More examples where that is being cast aside.

We're learning some new details today after the Smithsonian Institution decided to remove references to President Donald Trump's two impeachments from an exhibit on the American presidency.

I don't know what the ultimate endgame of that is. I know some of the statisticians at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they are not going to change how they do things because of this, but I think that calling into question and raising conspiracy theories and deciding that everything is political, it has a cumulative effect and all I know is that it's not a positive effect in the end. Where it leads, I don't know and I think anybody would probably make a mistake if they're trying to predict.

Perspective. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.