President Trump says he plans to announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) this week after he fired the previous BLS head following a weak jobs report.
Trump told reporters he'd announce the new BLS chief "over the next three, four days."
The president will also be announcing a nominee to replace Federal Reserve board of governors member Adriana Kugler, who announced Friday she will resign on Aug. 8.
Trump's firing of Erika McEntarfer on Friday after the dismal jobs report rocked Washington.
McEntarfer was appointed by former President Biden and she was confirmed with a strong bipartisan majority in the Senate in 2024.
Democrats are accusing Trump of shooting the messenger and refusing to acknowledge the impact his tariffs are having on the economy. They say Trump is politicizing government data and that they won't be able to trust future reports from his hand-picked BLS nominee.
Over the weekend, Trump and his senior officials hit the airwaves to defend the firing, with the president arguing McEntarfer "had the biggest miscalculation in over 50 years" after significant downward revisions to previous jobs reports.
Trump also baselessly claimed that McEntarfer rigged data ahead of the election to make the jobs numbers look better while Biden was in office.
"I then won the Election, anyway, and she readjusted the numbers downward, calling it a mistake, of almost one million jobs," Trump posted on social media. "A SCAM!"
Revisions to jobs reports are common, although Friday's downward revisions were startling for their severity, leading to a stock market sell-off and fresh concerns about an economic downturn.
"The data always suffers big revisions when the economy is at an inflection point, like a recession," Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi posted on X. "It's thus not at all surprising that we are seeing big downward revisions to the payroll employment numbers."
GOP strategist Karl Rove warned Trump is making the same mistake as Biden on the economy.
"What's ironic is, is that the Trump administration is making the same mistake that the Biden administration made, which was to basically, remember we had Bidenomics is working, well, now we have the golden age of American prosperity is returned, and Americans are not feeling that," Rove said on Fox News. "Better to say we're working hard to put America on the right road, rather than declaring premature victory. And I think that's a big mistake for the White House and is likely to come back and bite them in the midterm election."
The stock indices bounced back Monday.
MEANWHILE…
Trump on Monday opened new frontiers in his trade war.
The president announced that he'd raise tariffs further on India for continuing to buy Russian oil.
"They don't care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine," Trump posted on Truth Social. "Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA."
Trump had previously announced a 25 percent tariff on India, which is set to go into effect Thursday, along with the new tariff rates for dozens of countries.
Canada faces a 35 percent tariff, although Canadian trade official Dominic LeBlanc expressed optimism about a new trade deal with the U.S.
"We were obviously, obviously disappointed by that [tariff rate] decision," LeBlanc said. "We believe there's a great deal of common ground between the United States and Canada in terms of building two strong economies that work well together."
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