Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she is unfamiliar with a major government report that said the U.S. economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than initially reported.
Ms. Raimondo seemed to dismiss the news as misinformation from former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee.
Speaking to Ms. Raimondo in Chicago on Wednesday, ABC News played a clip of Mr. Trump saying the administration “padded the numbers.”
“When I hear that, first of all, I don’t believe it, because I have never heard Donald Trump say anything truthful,” Ms. Raimondo said.
“It is, though, from the Bureau of Labor,” the ABC interviewer interjected.
“I don’t — I’m not familiar with that,” Ms. Raimondo said.
Ms. Raimondo went on to defend Vice President Kamala Harris’ plans to help businesses and the economy.
Some Republicans expressed dismay that Ms. Raimondo seemed unfamiliar with a headline-generating economic report, given her job as commerce secretary. The annual jobs revision, while a routine practice, was the biggest negative change since the financial crisis in 2009.
“The Secretary of Labor not being aware of the recent devastating jobs report is yet another example of the extraordinary incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration,” Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, wrote on X, though he misidentified Ms. Raimondo’s job title. “We can’t stand for another four years of this mismanagement.”
RNC Research, an account on X that is quick to point out Biden administration flubs, posted a clip of the ABC News interview and wrote:
“Harris-Biden Commerce Sec. Gina Raimondo says she doesn’t believe new government data that shows almost a million of the jobs the Harris-Biden admin claimed to have ’created’ don’t actually exist.”
The Washington Times reached out to the Commerce Department for comment.
Speaking Wednesday at a campaign event in North Carolina, Mr. Trump called the jobs number revision a “massive scandal.”
“It really isn’t a revision — it is a total lie,” Mr. Trump said. “There has never been any revision like this.”
He said President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris got “caught” manipulating economic data, but there wasn’t any evidence the White House was directly involved in creating the initial jobs report.
The updated numbers were in a routine preliminary data revision that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases semi-annually, though the size of the revision was far from routine.
It was the latest sign that the job market is steadily slowing and adds to expectations the Federal Reserve will start cutting interest rates soon.
The Labor Department pegged the job growth average at 174,000 per month in the year ending March, a 68,000 monthly drop from the 242,000 initially reported.
The final numbers will be released next year.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.