Scott Bessent Trashes ‘Corrupted’ BLS as Joe Scarborough Defends Data Revisions: ‘Lazy!’

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent trashed the “corrupted” Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Thursday as he defended President Donald Trump’s decision to sack the agency’s head over job reporting revisions, calling the work “lazy.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Bessent doubled down on the administration’s claim that the BLS made a historic error in reporting U.S. job growth, justifying the abrupt dismissal of BLS chief Dr. Erika McEntarfer after July’s underwhelming jobs numbers and, more significantly, major downward revisions to May and June figures.

The July report showed just 73,000 jobs added and unemployment ticking up to 4.2%, far below forecasts. May’s gain of 144,000 was cut to just 19,000 while June’s 147,000 fell to a stunningly low 14,000.

“This was a five to six standard deviation mistake,” Bessent said when challenged on the firing by co-host Mika Brzezinski on how the firing would impact the country’s economic standing. “This is like if you got on a plane in Miami, thought you were going to New York and landed in Denver.”

Co-host Joe Scarborough pushed back, noting that such revisions are common and often reflect poor survey response rates, not political bias.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with ideology,” Scarborough argued, citing The Wall Street Journal editorial board’s defense of the BLS process by claiming employers are not participating as they had before and the agency was forced to project out its data.

“You and I both know, there are always these revisions,” he continued. “And this has been going on for decades, where you and I, Mika, everybody will watch and they’ll go: ‘They revised May’s numbers! They were 80% off!’ That’s been going on forever.”

“Is the Wall Street Journal, right?” the host asked.

Bessent dismissed that, calling the data collection methods outdated and “lazy.”

“Well, no. Because again, this was the biggest revision, I believe, in 30 years,” the secretary said. “And this again, it’s a five standard deviation miss. You didn’t land in Newark 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,” he added.

Bessent promised a replacement “who won’t have errors of this magnitude.”

Watch above via MSNBC.