The following is the transcript of the interview with White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Dec. 21, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to the Director of the White House National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, good morning to you.
KEVIN HASSETT, DIRECTOR NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: Good morning.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We took you literally. You said last Sunday you’d come back and talk to us about that household survey, the jobs picture. You said you really trust it. That report came out. It showed America added 64,000 jobs, with unemployment ticking up to 4.6%. But we’ve seen analysis, including from the top economist at us, navy, federal, saying the US is in a quote, hiring recession. Very few jobs being added since the spring, and wage gains are slowing. Are we in a hiring recession?
HASSETT: No, I don’t think so. I think that basically, the number was about what the market expected. It was a number that was less than 100 which is a little bit lower than you’d like. But then after that, we got the consumer price index numbers, which were really amazing. And so if you look at the three month moving average of core consumer prices, then they’re running at an annual rate of about 1.6% way below the Fed’s target. And my old friend, all the way back to grad school, Austin Goolsby, is now one of the Fed governors voting on interest rates, conceded that they should have cut rates faster and that he’s going to do so in the future because of this inflation number.
MARGARET BRENNAN: He was one of the dissenters when the Fed’s decision came out. But when it comes to inflation, as you just referred to, that number showed there was still a rise in inflation, it was just at a slower pace than expected. If you pull out energy and pull out food, it rose at the slowest pace since 2021 up 2.6% in November from a year ago. But then there are quirks in here, because it looks like the prices weren’t gathered until Thanksgiving discounts kicked in. There was no increase reflected in terms of housing costs. Why do you trust the data now, when you haven’t in the past?
HASSETT: Oh, you know, I think that you’re right to always be suspicious about data, and it’ll look a lot cleaner when we get a full survey, which we didn’t have this time. But you know, two of the three numbers, if we go back to the three month moving average, we’re fine. And so I think that the error band around the 1.6% inflation, about that’s the pace it’s running is probably pretty tight. Surely there will be supervisions, but I think the numbers are about right, and I usually, Margaret, don’t like to go to year over year when we’re talking about what’s going on with inflation, because that includes a lot of high inflation Biden months in the back, and fewer and fewer as we get further into the year. But I think that the trajectory right now is best seen by the three month moving average, and that’s below two, below the Fed target. So it means the Fed, as Austan Goolsbee said, has plenty of room to cut rates.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But the President said inflation has stopped. You’d acknowledge that’s an exaggeration.
HASSETT: Well, I guess the inflation being above the target has stopped, for sure, and so, but inflation is not zero Also, that’s fair.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay, he did not give those caveats. He just said inflation has stopped. But Kevin, Kevin Hassett, stay with us. I’ve got to take a quick break, and I want to talk about the rest of what we’ve learned. On the other side of it. We’ve got more questions. Stay with us.
PART 1 ENDS
PART 2 STARTS
MARGARET BRENNAN: Welcome back to Face The Nation, and we continue our conversation now with the Director of the White House National Economic Council Kevin Hassett. This past week, we saw the President announce further changes to immigration policy. He halted diversity visas. There are now 39 countries on this travel ban or restricted list. This is in addition to all the deportations and revocations of asylum. The business community has made clear that the constant changes make it hard for them to plan, particularly in the small business category. They’re concerned about a labor shortage and we’ve seen the U.S. workforce lose more than 1 million foreign-born workers in the past year. Are you hearing those concerns from the business community?
HASSETT: Actually, it’s the opposite. So in the sense that native-born workers are up more than 2 million. And so what we’ve seen is that as foreign-born workers, and a lot of them, don’t forget, were illegal immigrants that have been deported, that when foreign-born workers depart, then it creates jobs for people who are native-born. The interesting thing too, which I’d like to remind everybody, is that native-born Americans aren’t necessarily racially distinct at all. And so the majority of the native-born jobs that have been created over the last year are Hispanic Americans. It’s, you know, just basically taking folks that are legally in the country and getting the jobs to them is what we see in the data.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well the Associated General Contractors of America didn’t say they’re replacing those workers easily. They’re saying they’re having a hard time doing that, and issued a statement saying it’s a significant challenge, urging the administration to look at ways to expand the construction workforce and allow more people to lawfully enter the country.
HASSETT: Right. Well, one of the things we’re seeing, this is exactly how markets work. Right? So construction workers, their salaries this year have gone up by $3,300 on average, according to the latest report —
MARGARET BRENNAN: — Because the scarcity?
HASSETT: Well, but when the price goes up, then people say, oh, I should go and I used to be a construction worker, but now I’m doing something else. I should go back to construction work because the salaries are so high. And so we’re seeing a lot of that go on. And so we’re very bullish on construction, and really happy to see that wages are going way back up. And so instead of having, you know, basically illegal people come in and take jobs away from native-born Americans at low wages, we’re seeing people reenter the labor force at high wages.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But to be clear from the business community part of the question is what is legal? Because you’re changing the definition and pulling back asylum from some groups. So there’s confusion at the constant change in policy. Will there be clarity in the new year?
HASSETT: Oh, there will definitely be clarity in the new year. And I think there’s clarity now that what we’ve done is that we’ve made it so that people are legally residents of the country and legally allowed to work, that they’re, you know, basically top of the list when you’re looking for somebody to hire.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Let me ask you a bit about tariffs. Since as far back as July, we have heard the president refer to this idea of $2,000 checks being given out to households. The Treasury secretary said this would go to households making less than $100,000. Should Americans plan to receive those checks in 2026?
HASSETT: That’s going to depend on what happens with Congress. Congress is going to have to send those money to those peoples. But the thing we can say is that since July, we’ve had a lot of positive news about the economy. We’ve had a couple of quarters of almost 4% growth. We’ve got a big government surplus actually running for a few months in a row. The deficit relative to last year, is down by $600 billion and so in the summer, I wasn’t so sure that there was space for a check like that, but now I’m pretty sure that there is, and so I would expect that in the new year, the President will bring forth a proposal to Congress to make that happen.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So a new proposal for these, it’s not necessarily coming from existing tariff revenue?
HASSETT: Well, it could come from from tariff revenue, but in the end, you know, we get taxes, we get tariffs, we get revenue from lots of places, and then Congress decides how to spend those monies. That’s an appropriation. And so this would have to be money that would be an appropriation.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So don’t bank on it, in other words. So are you projecting that in the new year certain tariffs will remain in place, or do you see some of them going away?
HASSETT: I think that most of the tariffs that we’ve passed this year have proven their mettle. We’ve got still high growth, which people said we couldn’t if we had tariffs. We have reduction in the deficit. Reduction in the trade deficit. Imports from China are the lowest they’ve been since China entered the WTO. So there’s a lot of success to crow about in the tariff space. But there are also things that we’re hearing when we talk to people like trading partners and companies that trade a lot in the U.S.. There are also things that maybe could be adjusted. You saw that we decided to exempt coffee, for example, because we don’t make a lot of coffee in the U.S.
MARGARET BRENNAN: –And coffee prices are up.
HASSETT: And I think that if there’s something that’s not made in the U.S. at all, that there’s an appetite, and Jamieson Greer is leading the effort to study these matters, that there’s an appetite to exempt things if they’re really not meant to be made in the U.S. because of, you know, like climate or things like that.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You’ve also go got the Supreme Court decision pending in terms of the specific IEEPA, as they’re called, these are tariffs where the justification was citing fentanyl, Canadian crude, some Chinese imports. If the Supreme Court doesn’t find in your favor, who gets the refund? Is it the companies, or is it the consumers? How does that work?
HASSETT: Yeah, we really expect the Supreme Court is going to find with us, and I also think that if they didn’t find with us, that it’s going to be pretty unlikely that they’re going to call for widespread refunds, because it would be an administrative problem to get those refunds out to there. But basically, whoever paid the tariff, like, actually cut the check to buy the thing, would be the person who would be getting the refund, if there were one.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Doesn’t the administration claim it was the country that paid that? You’re saying the company.
HASSETT: It would be- like, I’m not talking about the incidence, right? That like, so the incidence of the tariff. So in the end, who pays the tariff depends on elasticities of supply and demand, and we know that China cut the price a lot, so that the post tariff price from Chinese goods is about what it was before the tariff. But the people who pay the tariff, if there is a refund, the people who actually paid for the good, the importer, in most cases, they’re the ones who would be the first line of defense for refunding the tariff. But I really, really don’t think that’s going to happen, it’d be very complicated. And then that person would be responsible for allocating the tariff refund to the appropriate folks.
MARGARET BRENNAN: That sounds like a mess.
HASSETT: Yes, it is a mess, and that’s why I think the Supreme Court wouldn’t do it.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, we’ll wait and see. I want to quickly ask you about the oil market. I asked you last Sunday about that decision to seize a tanker off the coast of Venezuela. We saw yet another one over the weekend. You said last Sunday, it probably won’t affect oil prices to be taking this oil off the black market. Do you stand by that? And was all that oil going to China?
HASSETT: Yeah, you know, I haven’t been briefed on the latest. I did see that this is another ship that was basically operating in the black market. And so there have been a little bit, there’s been a little bit of black market activity in the oil sector to go to sanctioned countries and to get them some oil. And they’re getting that oil in order to avoid the reforms that we think would make countries a better place. And so it’s not a lot of oil compared to world supply. And so I don’t think that people need to be worried here in the U.S. that the prices are going to go up because of these seizures of these ships. There’s just a couple of them, and they were black market ships.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Were these sanctioned ships going to China?
HASSETT: I’m not sure where they were going.
MARGARET BRENNAN: All right. Kevin Hassett, thank you for your time–
HASSETT: Thank you.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Have a great holiday. We’ll be right back.
