The following is the transcript of an interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sept. 7, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Good morning, and welcome to Face The Nation. We begin this morning with the Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett. Good morning and thank you for being here.
KEVIN HASSETT: Good morning. It’s great to be here.
MARGARET BRENNAN: In person.
KEVIN HASSETT: Yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: There’s a lot to get to with you, but I want to start on what just happened overnight. Russia has launched a very significant attack on Ukraine and in Kyiv. They actually even hit a Ukrainian government building. Does the U.S. condemn the assault? And what are you waiting for now in terms of triggering those sanctions on Russia?
KEVIN HASSETT: Well, as you know, I’m not one of the foreign policy advisors of the President, but at the National Economic Council we are responsible for making sure that sanctions get enforced and that people that are helping Russia with their war against Ukraine, as for example India has been doing, excuse me, by buying Russian oil, that we’re ready to respond to them economically. And you know, last night’s news is very disappointing and I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of talk today and tomorrow about the level of sanctions and the timing of sanctions.
MARGARET BRENNAN: The timing of additional sanctions on Russia.
KEVIN HASSETT: Correct, yes. I mean it’s up to the president in the end. But yes, it’s a very disappointing set of affairs.
MARGARET BRENNAN: On the U.S. economy, there were 22,000 jobs added last month. The past two months of data were also revised down. You’ve said in interviews this week it suggests there’s less momentum here than you thought. Has job creation stalled and should the Federal Reserve be concerned about the jobs picture?
KEVIN HASSETT: Right, well, well first of all, the interesting thing about the jobs numbers, right, is that they had the biggest revisions in 50 years over the summer, and we came in with 22,000 in August. But if you look at what they said in 23 and 24, they have two ways of estimating the jobs. There’s something called the payroll survey, where they ask the employers how many people did you hire? Then they have something called the household survey, where they call up people, they say do you, do you have a job?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
KEVIN HASSETT: And over those two years, the payroll numbers said that we created four and a half million jobs and the household survey said about 2 million fewer, about two and a half million jobs. And they should have the same answer. And so for August, for example, the payroll survey said 22,000 and the household survey said 288,000. And so I think that what’s going on is that these old fashioned ways of surveying, like I wonder if you’ve ever gotten a survey in the mail and filled it out and mailed it back in, maybe you have, but I think that that’s the way they’re trying to do it. And the reason we’re getting these massive revisions and these numbers that don’t make sense is really that we’ve got to modernize the way we do the labor data. But if you look at the non-labor data, you know, second quarter GDP was revised up to 3.3%. The Atlanta Fed’s GDP estimate for the third quarter right now is 3% and so industrial production is at an all time high.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you believe all that data? All those models are functioning.
KEVIN HASSETT: No, the point is when there’s dissonance in data that you have to sort of watch how it all works out.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Got it.
KEVIN HASSETT: And the thing that I’m most suspicious of right now, in terms of data quality, is the job number. In part because there are other ways to do it. There’s this company called Homebase that does it. Their August number is 150. But again, even think about this, if we ask households how many jobs do they have? It’s plus 288,000 in August. If we ask the employers, it’s 22,000. Then that’s that becomes a puzzle for economists, like what is wrong with the data? And we kind of know what’s wrong with the data. What’s wrong with the data is people aren’t filling out the forms and sending in the surveys.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Last month, the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, suggesting there was political bias. Not just what you’re talking about, which is a very technical issue on how data is collected and crunched. Did you fix the political bias or —
KEVIN HASSETT: — Well, there, there are patterns of the data that look like political bias, but they could be accidental. And that’s why we need to get a new set of eyes in there to make sure that things are more transparent, that we modernize the surveys and we make them so that more people trust them. But think about this, at the Federal Reserve —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — So you don’t trust these numbers?
KEVIN HASSETT: I think the BLS numbers need to really be improved. They need to be modernized. And I gave a talk at the BLS next to Alan Greenspan we had a few years ago where I talked about the necessity of modernizing them, and so I still agree with that position.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But trend line wise, when we hear from companies like Caterpillar, Deere, Ford, Procter & Gamble, that their costs are going up due to tariffs. That doesn’t suggest there’s going to be robust hiring in those sectors, right? When a company is taking on something that could hurt their productivity or profitability I should say?
KEVIN HASSETT: Well we’ve seen, inflation has come down quite a bit. It was in the high threes when President Trump took office. The average over the six months is 1.9. And, you know, even the Fed right now clearly agrees that inflation has been under control if you believe futures markets because the federal funds futures markets are now saying the Fed is going to cut interest rates three times this year —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — Expected to (inaudible) —
KEVIN HASSETT: — And so the Fed, they’re expected to. And so, therefore, you know, the Fed is expected to feel like it’s comfortable with where inflation is right now.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But my point being that doesn’t forecast from these companies a scenario in which they would necessarily be hiring. Have you been able to calculate what the immigration crackdown has done to employment?
KEVIN HASSETT: Well, yeah, there are, there are a couple of things that we could look at. First of all, the private sector employment is up by about half a million this year and government workers, government employment is down by about 100,000. There’s another thing is that most of the jobs that have been created in the U.S. are for native born workers, and they’ve actually, there’s actually been a reduction in labor supply for non-native born workers.
MARGARET BRENNAN: How do you prove that?
KEVIN HASSETT: Excuse me?
MARGARET BRENNAN: How do you prove that?
KEVIN HASSETT: Oh, we have a, we have a survey where they actually ask it. Now, maybe we don’t trust the surveys, right?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Right.
KEVIN HASSETT: And there is actually a thing —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — And if you know the corporations are hiring undocumented, or have a pattern of it, are you prosecuting those companies?
KEVIN HASSETT: There’s technicalities that when someone’s released into the country then, in the previous administration, then they would often get a number that would allow them to work legally until they went to court. And so there were, for sure, people that were undocumented —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — But going after the employers? —
KEVIN HASSETT: — who were being able to work. But the other thing that you can see in the data, because we get the unemployment insurance claims by like county, that about 80% of the claims for unemployment over the last few months have come from blue states. And so there are places like Portland and Chicago where people are fleeing the cities and you’re seeing that in the numbers too.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you don’t plan to prosecute companies who had this pattern, you’re talking about, of hiring people in the country illegally?
KEVIN HASSETT: I don’t work for the Justice Department, but I do see the pattern of native born versus non-native born employment.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we are also seeing in that data, you say you don’t trust necessarily, that it’s manufacturing. That’s trade related. That that is where the lack of hiring is happening. Those are the areas that the President had promised there would be new jobs. When do those new jobs in those sectors come?
KEVIN HASSETT: Right, let’s think about it again though that in terms of the way that the data are a little frustrating for everyone right now that industrial production is at an all time high, GDP is booming, productivity was up 3.8% in the last quarter, and it looks like manufacturing jobs are down. And so how is it that industrial production is at an all time high while manufacturing employment is down? It’s something that we’re looking forward to seeing what happens in the revisions. The revisions have been, last year – there’s a benchmark revision next week – last year, the revision was more than a million over the last year. This is why we need new and better data.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we’ll wait to see if those jobs are created. I want to ask you about the Fed. Because the president, you were standing next to him in the Oval Office, said he might basically make you one of the most powerful men in the world because he’s considering you to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Our CBS polling we just did shows that 70% of Americans want the Federal Reserve to make decisions independently from President Trump. But there’s a big partisan difference here. 59% of Republicans say the Fed should be guided by what Trump wants. 41% should be independent of Trump. Which Republican camp do you fall into?
KEVIN HASSETT: Oh, if I were in that survey then I would say 100% that monetary policy, Federal Reserve monetary policy, needs to be fully independent of political influence.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Including from President Trump?
KEVIN HASSETT: Including from President Trump. The fact is that we’ve looked at countries that have allowed the leaders to take over the central banks, and what tends to happen is that it’s a recipe for inflation and misery for consumers. And so central bank independence is something that, as you saw, there was a hearing this week about that, that Democrats and Republicans and the White House all agreed about. Now the question is, has the current central bank been as independent as we would like, as transparent we would as we would like? And I think that there’s some dispute about that, which we could go into if you’d like.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, Secretary Bessent went into that in an article in the Wall Street Journal this past week. —
KEVIN HASSETT: — He did. —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — He talked about the central bank’s independence being under threat due to mission creep. There should be an independent, non partisan review of the entire Fed, its role in regulation, monetary policy and research. What’s your plan to overhaul the Fed?
KEVIN HASSETT: Well, I don’t have a plan to overhaul the Fed right now. I’m just happy to do my job —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — You have to have been thinking about it. —
KEVIN HASSETT: — Look, I’ve been the President’s one of his top economic advisers for nine years. We talk about everything from golf to decorating the Oval Office to monetary policy, but right now what I’m focused on is doing my job as Director of National Economic Council every day.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you would endorse what Secretary Bessent wrote in that article fully —
KEVIN HASSETT: — Yes I agree with this article, yes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you would be prepared to implement that vision for the Federal Reserve if you are chair?
KEVIN HASSETT: It’s a hypothetical that we’ll see.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, it certainly seems from one of the political appointees, the Cabinet member, to be a vision for the future of the Fed that the Trump administration would like.
KEVIN HASSETT: I agree with his vision, but I look forward to the President deciding who is going to be the Federal Reserve Chair and I think that he and Secretary Bessent will do that ably. There are a lot of great candidates.
MARGARET BRENNAN: What will you do if the Supreme Court does rule that the President’s tariff policy, or at least those under the IEPPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, are not legal?
KEVIN HASSETT: We certainly don’t expect the Supreme Court to do that and I think that we’re on pretty high ground and so it’s a very unlikely scenario. But the fact is that there are other legal authorities that one could use to get the same outcome. 232s, 301s, you know numbers that we could go into if you like —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — Other ways to implement tariffs. —
KEVIN HASSETT: — But it might be like, yeah, too deep a dive for the show on a Sunday. But, but yes, there are other things that could happen should it go that way.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Alright. Kevin Hassett, thanks for coming in this Sunday morning.
KEVIN HASSETT: Thank you, it’s great to be here.