Two economists appointed by Trump – and longtime friends – are displayed on Trump’s employment data

Still bitter in the “rigged” job report last week, which has shown lower than expected employment growth, Trump summoned an impromptu press conference on Thursday evening to present graphics with what he called “any new number”.

Stephen Moore, economist of the heritage foundation, said at the press conference that the figures justified the dismissal by Trump of the former BLS chief, Erika Mcentarfer. He considered that during the last two years of the administration of President Joe Biden, the BLS has overestimated the creation of jobs of 1.5 million jobs.

In an interview Fortune, Moore said he disagreed with the president that the figures had been on purpose. He never met Mcentarfer, he said, but said he was “suspicious” that the employment numbers published just before the elections are revised.

This suspicion was the basis of the graph that Moore brought to the Oval Office, which showed three bars: reference revisions, monthly revisions and total growth of jobs estimated from 2024.

Beach – Who Moore said he has been known for 30 years and calls a “good friend” – called these figures “the strangest thing in the world”.

“He should have known better than doing so,” said Beach.

Beach has found problems at all levels.

The first bar – labeled as a revision of August jobs – used a preliminary estimate which was then revised downwards in February, which means that the number on the graph did not correspond to the official final figure, said Beach.

Moore aTS that the beach did not include its method. He said the team compared the initial “title” job numbers published each month to the revised and compared final numbers, and summarizing these differences, rather than simply drawing the final correction of August.

Beach also argued that the reference revision figure on the graph was incorrect and did not line up with the published BLS data. The last bar, labeled “total revisions”, was mathematically imperfect, he said, because it added reference revisions to monthly revisions, even if the reference index already integrates these monthly changes-“like counting the same apple twice and claiming that you have two.”

Moore rejected the idea that it was a double counting, saying that he was capturing separate steps in the revision process.

In addition, during the press conference, Moore said that revenue figures came from unpublished data from the census office; Beach says it makes them unverifiable. Moore said Fortune His team has developed an algorithm to estimate these income figures in advance with what it claims to be 97%clarification, and plans to publish a report explaining the method.

The greatest disagreement between the two longtime friends is perhaps philosophical. While Moore said he did not believe that the figures were faked, he also said that the positive revisions for Biden “haunted the eyebrows” and embraced the president to say that the BLs were corrupt.

Beach could not understand this plot. When he led BLS from 2019 to 2023, he personally saw the decentralized nature of the process and the “hard” loyalty of statistics that have traveled hundreds of data. Each person of the role BLS has such a special job that it was difficult to imagine how they could conspire to push the data of jobs in one direction or another.

“I mean, there is a person at BLS who specializes in data at consumer places,” said Beach.

Trump’s suspicions are more than simply confusing, said Beach. They were also “very dangerous”. The markets are based so on confidence in the data of the report on jobs, he said, that Trump’s words and actions have probably already occurred.

Based on his experience in the private sector, he explained that uncertainty in certain metrics forces business leaders to expand their “margin of error” during investment, which can kill agreements. If companies doubt the accuracy of federal statistics, he warned, they will eventually turn to alternative measures.

Rather than blaming the messenger or sowing unnecessary doubt, Beach stressed that many problems with statistical data could be resolved by modernization.

“I served two years as a chief statistician of the United States, as well as the BLS commissioner,” said Beach. “So I know how the system is weakened, and it was weakened over time by the lack of attention of the congress and the lack of modernization. So there are a lot to do. ”

He hoped that Moore could find the opportunity to better explain his statistical differences. Moore has always had a different way of building figures, which Beach said he had benefited from.

“But sometimes he does not really get engaged with a subject at the time, it is important for him to make this commitment,” said Beach. “And I think it’s an example.”