Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick argued Wednesday that former President Joe Biden — not his boss, President Donald Trump — is to blame for recent negative economic data and a plunge in stock prices.
“The president spoke about it last night,” Lutnick said in an interview on Bloomberg television. “He said Biden left him a pile of poop.”
“He left him a lot of the economy that [Trump’s] trying to fix,” Lutnick said.
Trump in an address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night said Biden had left him an “economic catastrophe” and an “inflation nightmare” to deal with.
In fact, the U.S. economy grew by 2.8% in the past year, and the inflation rate in December was 2.9% — well below the 40-year high of 9.1% hit in June 2022.
Lutnick’s comments came as he was asked by Bloomberg about “data over the last few weeks that hasn’t been great,” as well as concerns that Trump’s massive new tariffs on Canada and Mexico will stall economic growth and stock prices.
“You’re looking at Biden data,” Lutnick retorted.
“Do not try to besmirch my President Trump with Biden’s nonsense,” Lutnick said.,
“We are in the middle of March,” he said. “My president took over Jan. 20. You think economic data coming out in early March is Donald Trump-related data?”
“Come on. You got to be kidding me,” he said. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
Pressed on whether he was arguing that troubling economic data was misleading, Lutnick said, “I think that data is leading you to understand that if Joe Biden was still in charge, you’d be in trouble.”
“But you have a new president, you have a new sheriff in charge,” Lutnick said. “You see the investments, you see already there’s trillions of dollars of manufacturing moving to America.”
Earlier Wednesday, the payroll processing firm ADP reported that companies added just 77,000 new workers in February, well below the upwardly revised figure of 186,000 workers in January, and almost half of what was the Dow Jones consensus estimate for the month.
On Monday and Tuesday, the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 1,300 points combined.
Also on Monday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta issued a forecast that calls for gross domestic product to fall by 2.8% in the first quarter of 2025, down from -1.5% last week. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate in mid-February had projected a rise — not a drop — of 2.3%
And last week, the Conference Board reported that U.S. “consumer confidence dropped sharply in February,” which was Trump’s first full month back in the White House. The 7-point drop was the largest decline in consumer confidence since August 2021.
Wednesday was not the first time Lutnick tried to put distance between the Trump White House and economic data it does not like.
On Sunday, he suggested the administration might change how gross domestic product is tabulated.
“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
The idea was quickly panned by economists. Breaking out government spending as a separate category from consumer spending in GDP calculations “could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the U.S. economy’s health.” the Associated Press noted.
The idea has at least one high-profile fan, however: Elon Musk.
Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency is waging a crusade to shrink the federal government’s workforce and its budget, on Friday tweeted: “A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.”
“Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better,” Musk wrote.
Lutnick’s suggestion that economic data was open to political revision is part of a broader Trump administration campaign against government data collection and dissemination.
Last week, Lutnick disbanded two expert committees that worked with the government to produce economic statistics, Reuters reported Tuesday.
One of them, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, helped generate data on inflation, on employment, and on gross domestic product.