The White House is downplaying this month’s jobs report, contending that the uncertainty the economy was grappling with over President Donald Trump‘s tariffs and whether Congress would pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is over.
In response to the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that only 73,000 were added to the economy in July and that 258,000 fewer jobs were added in May and June than previously reported, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Stephen Miran told the Washington Examiner that “about 60% of the overall revisions” were because of “changes to seasonal adjustments,” for example, teachers.
“Second is our border policies,” Miran said Friday at the White House. “Keeping American communities and American families safe have led to a decline since the president took office of over a million foreign-born jobs, whereas American jobs have replaced those.”
“Finally,” the Hudson Bay Capital Management senior strategist and co-founder of asset management firm Amberwave Partners continued, “there’s the fact that there was uncertainty around tariffs that was critical to creating the leverage that the president used to accomplish some of the most impressive one-sided trade deals in history.”
For Miran, there was also economic uncertainty regarding whether Congress would pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, among other provisions, extended the tax reforms in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and whether the economy was headed toward a recession.
Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July and, on Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that the economy expanded by 3% during the second quarter of this year.
“Both of those sources of uncertainty are resolved,” he said. “There’s a spate of trade deals with some of our most important trading partners in place that are going to be huge tailwinds to the economy. The ‘one big, beautiful bill’ is law [and] contains massively powerful incentives for investing in America, for making America the best place to do business. … People know what the lay of the land is now, both in the trade front and on the tax front, and so we expect things to get materially stronger from here now that our policies are starting to take place.”
When asked whether July’s jobs report could put economic pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates amid Trump’s political campaign on Chairman Jerome Powell to do the same, Miran indirectly agreed.
“I don’t want to sort of tell the Fed what to do, but I do think that these data are evidence that the president not only has had a great track record in the past on making predictions about inflation, about the economy, but that he’s probably right now too,” he said.
July’s jobs report, finding that nonfarm payroll positions increased by 73,000, was more than June’s 14,000 but fewer than expectations of 100,000.
Miran told other reporters at the press conference that “obviously there were elements of [the jobs report] that we didn’t love,” but that he would describe July’s 4.2% unemployment rate, an increase from June’s 4.1%, “as stable, not as rising” and “noise.”
“We still are plowing ahead, full speed ahead on deregulation,” he said. “We’re plowing full speed ahead on energy abundance. These are all tailwinds for the economy.”
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Earlier in the week, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told the Washington Examiner he was confident about July’s job report after the gross domestic product data drop.
“We’re expecting that the number that you saw today in the GDP release is about the path of inflation right now,” Hassett said Wednesday. “We’re very bullish on the jobs report because we think that after the ‘big, beautiful bill’ was passed, that, already, there was a lot of positive momentum. And we think that July is going to be really strong.”