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  "publishedAt": "2026-03-06T18:53:31.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Economy",
    "Business",
    "Jobs",
    "Jobs Report",
    "Kevin Hassett",
    "Lori Chavez-DeRemer",
    "reported",
    "struggled",
    "massive strike",
    "recent update",
    "pushing",
    "an average of 15,000 new jobs",
    "five of the last nine months",
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    "under investigation for misconduct"
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  "textContent": "Trump administration officials scrambled Friday to explain away the latest horrendous jobs numbers, but couldn’t conjure up more than blaming the weather or fake numbers.\n\nThe Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier in the day that the U.S. job market had shed 92,000 jobs in February, meaning that the U.S. economy has lost 19,000 jobs since April 2025.\n\nNational Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett struggled on CNBC to summon an explanation for the “surprisingly negative” report that did not include Donald Trump’s disastrous economic policies.\n\nHassett blamed a spate of severe winter weather, a massive strike at a major health care provider in California and Hawaii, and a recent update to the BLS’s birth-death model that tracks the opening and closing of businesses.\n\nHe urged people to look at the average growth: “If you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month, and a surprisingly negative one this one, but on average it’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down so much the break-even employment is probably in the 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.”\n\nThe Trump administration has been pushing Americans to lower their expectations for job growth to reflect a labor market that doesn’t rely on undocumented immigrants. Trump officials have argued that a job market that used to produce 200,000 jobs a month should now be expected to churn out closer to 50,000.\n\nIn reality, the average labor market growth in 2025 was only half of what Hassett is selling—closer to an average of 15,000 new jobs per month. Meanwhile, five of the last nine months have seen job losses, indicating a policy-driven downward trend, not one caused by snow or strike.\n\nBut Hassett indicated that he was focused on pushing something else entirely: Trump’s violent and illegal efforts to steal oil from foreign nations as a sign that stability was on the horizon.\n\nLabor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also tried to blame the “bad report” on weather and the strike, before just blatantly lying about the publicly available numbers.\n\n“That has been resolved, so we’re hoping to see those numbers tick back up next month,” Chavez-DeRemer said on Fox Business. “But overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months.”\n\nIn reality, the latest report saw 126,000 jobs added in January, and 92,000 taken away in February. That’s just 31,000 new jobs. Either Chavez-DeRemer is too stupid to do the math, or she thinks you are. She’s currently under investigation for misconduct.",
  "title": "Trump Officials Spiral on Air Trying to Defend His Garbage Economy"
}