MAGA influencer and former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon spoke to Heritage Foundation senior scholar E.J. Antoni on Friday after July’s jobs report — which included major downward revisions for June and May — dropped

The Labor Department also announced that the U.S. economy added 73,000 jobs in July and revised the June jobs numbers down to 14,000 from 147,000. May, likewise, was revised down to 19,000 from the previous 144,000 jobs estimate – meaning the economy added 258,000 fewer jobs in those two months than previously estimated.

“First off, I want to talk about something you’ve been on here for four years [and] complained about, and that is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and whether we get accurate numbers. Now everybody’s talking about the number here. It’s a quarter of a million jobs. They’re like on the downside,” Bannon began, noting the major revisions.

“It turns out we didn’t get, and now it’s a restatement. What in the hell is going on there? And have we put in our own person into BLS? Is a MAGA Republican that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet, sir?” Bannon asked Antoni.

“No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there. And I think that’s part of the reason why we continue to have all of these different data problems. You know, the guy we had previously, Bill Beach, is actually a great guy, a brilliant statistician. And he recognized some of the problems that we had in the data. He was taking steps to fix that,” Antoni replied, adding:

But unfortunately, he was removed by the Biden administration. He’s not there anymore. And he’s been replaced by someone who, frankly, I think is incompetent. And that shows with the fact that the problems in the statistics that first became evident all the way back in the spring of 2022. Those problems are still there.

And if we can go to the first chart here, I think it really helps illustrate that, where essentially what you can see is the fact that the disparity between the number of people who are saying they have a job, who are employed, that’s in brown there, versus the line in gray is the number of non-farm payrolls we have. As you can see, before the pandemic, they tracked very, very well together, but since then, they’ve really started to spread apart. And that problem has never actually been fixed. In other words, we’re not correctly estimating either the number of people with jobs or the number of actual jobs in the country — or both.

And if we go to the next chart here, we can get a better sense of some of the problem. What continuously keeps happening is that we get an initial estimate for the number of jobs and then that figure has to get revised down and pretty dramatically. Now, this is just over the last year. The reason I chose a year, though, is because over the course of a year, you should have some months revised up, some months revised down, but all in all, it should average out to zero.

That’s not what’s happening anymore. There’s clearly a negative bias in the revisions, which means there’s a positive bias in the initial numbers. In other words, we get an overly optimistic report, and then we later find out that it wasn’t that great. And so now we see that for the last several months, most of the jobs that we thought we were adding didn’t actually exist. Again, this is not a problem unique to the Trump administration or unique to 2025. It happened in ’22, in ’23, and in ’24.

In fact, earlier this week, the BLS announced with their latest round of quarterly data that 2024 is gonna see another major downward revision. Unfortunately, we’re just not gonna get that report until the start of next year, but it is coming. We’re gonna see hundreds of thousands of jobs that we thought we had in 2024 — it turns out they never even existed.

Watch the clip above via WarRoom.

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