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Trump’s budget director baselessly claims Obama was ‘manipulating’ jobs data

There is no evidence the jobs data was manipulated under President Obama.

Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney. CREDIT: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney. CREDIT: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

The first report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to measure unemployment and job creation under President Trump came out on Friday. It showed a healthy economy adding jobs, which continues a long streak.

But Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, wasn’t content to highlight a steadily growing economy. This weekend, he tried to cast doubt on the numbers that came out under President Obama, claiming that the administration was “manipulating” them to look better than they were.

“We’ve thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers in terms of the number of people in the workforce to make the unemployment rate, that percentage rate, look smaller than it was,” he told Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union.

Instead, he argued for focusing only on jobs, not the unemployment rate. “The only thing you should really look at is the number of jobs created. And as long as that number is above 250,000 dollars [sic], then the economy is doing extraordinarily well, and that was the number we hit last week.”

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There is no evidence that the numbers released during the Obama administration by the BLS were manipulated in any way. The agency has used the same method to calculate its numbers since 1940.

While there are many different ways to measure the economy, the BLS reported all of them throughout Obama’s presidency. Mulvaney mentioned U6, a technical term for a measure of how many people are unemployed that takes more into account than the most commonly used figure, which measures people who were out of work and actively seeking a job. U6 also counts the share who have given up looking for a job or who have a job but not as many hours as they want.

That rate dropped from 14.2 percent when Obama took office to 9.4 percent when he left. It fell again, to 9.2 percent, in Friday’s report.

Mulvaney isn’t quite right on his own preferred measure of the economy’s health: Friday’s jobs report, the first to measure the economy under President Trump, showed that it added 235,000 jobs, not 250,000.

If success is only measured by the number of jobs added, then it’s hard to see how the Obama administration was hiding its failure by talking about the unemployment rate, which fell from 7.8 percent when Obama took office to 4.8 percent by the time he left. Obama also oversaw 76 straight months of job creation, including 20 months above Mulvaney’s random marker of 250,000 jobs added.

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But the gross number of jobs added doesn’t take the larger picture into account, such as a growing population or a growing or shrinking labor force as people enter or leave jobs. Without that context, the numbers don’t tell a full story about whether people are finding work or struggling to get jobs.

Mulvaney seemed to admit that the numbers under Obama hadn’t been cooked toward the end of the interview, saying of the latest report, “The BLS did not change the way they count, I don’t think.”

But the question was raised by Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, on Friday. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed the official BLS numbers were “phony” and a “hoax.”

When asked about this and what Trump thought of the healthy jobs report under his own watch, Spicer replied with a chuckle, “I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly: ‘They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.’”