White House officials on Sunday defended President Trump's decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) following a weak jobs report, a move that has sparked broad criticism.

"The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable," Kevin Hassett, chair of the National Economic Council, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Hassett said in another interview on "Fox News Sunday" that the BLS commissioner has a responsibility to explain major revisions such as the one seen in Friday's jobs report, which showed 258,000 fewer jobs for prior months than initially reported.

“The big downward revision is something of a puzzle. I don’t think it was explained very well. And I think that markets might be as much unsettled by the fact that the data are so noisy,” Hassett said.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, one of Trump’s top tariff negotiators, said in an interview that aired on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday that

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