You would think the secretary of the department of commerce would keep updated with BLS data. Do these people not have staff that prep them for interviews?
@Cje95 could probably provide some insight here. Isn't it the responsibility of staffers to provide the days pertinent news and data points to legislators?
It was one of the top news items of the day. My guess is she absolutely knew about it but thought she could lie and claim it is was "trump misinformation" and the reporter wouldn't call her on it.
reply
Due to being in recess for August, I think a lot of the outrage you would see from Congressional Members is being muted. If this had happened in a couple of weeks I think we would have seen hellacious action coming from The Hill. Right now a lot of staff is either in the District office for their Member or if you work on a Committee on a staff del visiting something within your Committees jurisdiction so that might also be part of the reason for the muted response.
Back to your question as the revisions are being made she 100% knew that they were at least trending in a bad direction. I would expect her staff to have alerted her at certain thresholds of "wrongness". These types of revisions are not unheard of though. During Trump's time in office the did a revision election year about how they were 500k people high and at the time everyone made a huge deal out of it.
I have met Sec. Raimondo and all I can guess is that she was praying for some last-minute hail mary that would have helped lower the number. This number is generated by her staff so it is a little wild that she is somehow linking Trump to this. That would mean people have been in the Department for 4 plus years I guess just waiting around? It doesn't make any sort of logical sense.
This is also the person whose Government email was hacked by China for months so I guess nothing should really surprise me from her. Either way I am sure that once Members return we will see this brought up again. At a minimum you will see either the Ed and Workforce Committee or the Financial Services Committee fire off a letter demanding an explanation. There isn't really a way out for her from what I have seen because it wasn't like this data was dumped on her all at once it comes in phases so she knew or if she didn't I think that might be even worse that her staff isn't keeping her in the loop.
reply
Thanks. Nice recap
reply
818k is a large adjustment, around 28 percent.
reply
Oh its a fucking absurd and borderline criminal revision esp. since the Fed for as much as we all hate them has kept rates high because the labor numbers refused to break. Well it turns out now they broke a while ago and screwed the Fed and all the normal people.
reply
The jobs report should have 2 numbers: government jobs and private sector jobs
reply
I will say outside of Congress it is pretty hard to get fired after 5-10 years of working. I doubt the government number would ever change to significantly. That being said something obviously needs to change because the current situation is crap as well.
reply
Job growth was narrowly based in June, with government and healthcare jobs accounting for nearly three-fourths of total job gains. The strong increase in government jobs (+70,000) was driven by job gains at the state and local level (+65,000).
Private sector payrolls continued to slow in June to 136,000 from 193,000 in May, with healthcare and social assistance accounting for 82,000 of those jobs.2 Diving deeper into the details, goods producing jobs rose 19,000 in June, as strong gains in construction employment offset a decline in manufacturing jobs. There was some June weakness in the service sector, as employment increased 117,000, down from 181,000 in May. While the healthcare sector saw strong gains in June, most other service sectors lost momentum.
reply