■ The unemployment rate could reach 20% by next month.
Washington — Two of President Donald Trump’s top economic advisers projected Sunday that unemployment will climb as the coronavirus pandemic continues its sweep across the United States, with one official predicting that the unemployment rate will jump to 20% by next month.
The statements from White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin came three days after the Labor Department reported its highest unemployment figures since the Great Depression, and as the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 79,000.
They also came as a Senate panel announced that four administration officials who had been set to testify in person on the pandemic this week will instead do so via videoconference because of their proximity to two White House staff members who recently tested positive. One of those staffers is an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, but a spokesman said Sunday that Pence plans to be at the White House today.
At a time when governors are grappling with how and when to safely reopen their states, the comments by Hassett and Mnuchin underscore that the country is far from snapping back to normal and that further economic pain is probably still to come.
In an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Hassett said the unemployment rate probably will rise to “north of 20%” in the next month, up from 14.7% reported Friday.
“To get unemployment rates like the ones that we’re about to see ... which I think will climb up towards 20% by next month, you have to really go back to the Great Depression to see that,” Hassett told host Margaret Brennan.
He added that “nobody knows” when those who have lost their jobs will be able to go back to work, clarifying a statement he made upon the release of Friday’s jobs report that “almost everybody” who has accounted for the recent rise in unemployment “said they expect to go back to work in six months.”
Hassett’s acknowledgment of the country’s dire economic straits was echoed by Mnuchin, who said on “Fox News Sunday” that he expects the second quarter of this year to be worse than the first.
“The reported numbers are probably going to get worse before they get better,” Mnuchin told host Chris Wallace, later adding: “I think you’re going to have a very, very bad second quarter.”
When asked by Wallace whether the country’s unemployment number was “close to 25% at this point, which is Great Depression neighborhood,” Mnuchin said, “Chris, we could be.”
According to the report released Friday, the U.S. economy shed 20.5 million jobs in April, wiping out a decade of employment gains in a single month as businesses across the country shut down or curtailed operations in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus.