Biden's bogus claim on foreign contracts under Trump As he rolled out a "Made in America" executive order, prodding federal agencies to buy more domestic goods, President Biden claimed that "under the previous administration, the federal government contracts awarded directly to foreign companies went up 30 percent." Something seemed off, and we immediately got cracking. Former president Donald Trump had carried out his own "Buy American" campaign, but here Biden was saying contracts to foreign companies soared under Trump's watch. When we asked the White House for a citation, we were told that Biden had used a calculation from his 2020 campaign. Okay, but when we dug into the campaign's math, with the help of independent experts who agreed to crunch the numbers, we found that contracts to foreign companies had grown closer to 3 percent a year, not 30 percent over three years, as Biden claimed. The president earned Four Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. John Kerry's spin on solar and wind jobs Kerry, the former secretary of state, is now Biden's chief emissary building international support to mitigate climate change. "The fastest-growing job in the United States before covid was solar power technician," Kerry said at the White House on Jan. 27. "... And the second-fastest-growing job was wind turbine technician," he said on MSNBC the next morning. Kerry bungled the numbers, according to our review of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Wind is before solar, not vice versa, and those professions are projected to be the first- and third-fastest-growing jobs, not first and second. More importantly, his framing is misleading because, according to the government statistics he relied on, the actual number of jobs gained is relatively small. The percentage gain appears high because the number of jobs in 2019 for both solar panel installers and wind turbine technicians began from a relatively small baseline. Kerry earned Two Pinocchios. The projected new jobs in solar and wind industries over 10 years amount to just 20 percent of the current number of coal jobs. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. By Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly, Salvador Rizzo, Leslie Shapiro and Leo Dominguez ● Read more » | | | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | 
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