Top Trump administration officials questioned the data used by the administration to rebuke a United Nations report on U.S. poverty, Foreign Policy reported on Thursday.
The administration called the report, which found that 40 million Americans are poor and more than 5 million are in “Third World conditions” “inaccurate, inflammatory and irresponsible” in a statement rebuking the finding.
Emails obtained by the magazine show that Trump officials included their own data in the statement rebuffing the U.N. report. Economic officials who were consulted on the draft of the rebuttal questioned the validity of the data, according to the outlet, which reported that the economic officials’ comments were “watered down or ignored altogether.”
One official from the White House Council of Economic Advisers noted that the phrase “The U.S. is entering a new era of economic growth and prosperity,” may not be entirely accurate, as the growth began during the Obama administration and many not continue, according to Foreign Policy.
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The final version of the statement used the original wording.
Other suggestions were taken, including one to delete a line about salaries increasing.
“Wages haven’t really picked up, other than for supervisors,” one official from the Council of Economic Advisers wrote, the magazine reported.
At least one other economist reportedly challenged the draft statement’s use of data from the conservative Heritage Foundation, rather than figures from the Census Bureau. The wording about the data was tweaked to reflect that it came from differing sources.
Officials at the Council of Economic Advisers did not answer Foreign Policy’s questions on the writing of the statement.
White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters told the publication that the council was “in complete agreement with the economic assessment in the United States’ rebuttal to the U.N.’s Report on Poverty.”
The report was highly critical of the U.S.’s official policies, saying that the economic conditions could be solved by politicians.
“At the end of the day, however, particularly in a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power,” the report states. “With political will, it could readily be eliminated.”
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said earlier this year that it was “ridiculous” for the U.N. to analyze poverty in the U.S.