Bessent Says Labor Data Clean-Up Should Have Happened Long Ago

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defended President Donald Trump’s firing of the head of the agency that reports US labor data hours after an unexpectedly weak jobs report, saying a revamp was long overdue.

“Cleaning up the BLS was something that should have been done long ago,” Bessent said on MSNBC Thursday, referring to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The mistake that they made last week was a five-to-six standard deviation mistake. This is like, if you got on a plane in Miami, thought you were going to New York and landed in Denver.”

Friday’s employment data showed a 258,000 ...