The US recession began before President George W. Bush took office, the White House said on Monday, contradicting the arbiter of US business cycles, which has said the slump began on Mr Bush's watch.
In the annual Economic Report of the President, the White House said economic activity peaked in the fourth quarter of 2000, several months earlier than the March 2001 recession start cited by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
"While some arbitrariness in determining the date on which a recession began is inevitable, revisions since the NBER made its decision for the most recent recession strongly suggest that the business-cycle peak was before March 2001," the Bush administration said in the report.
Mr Bush's economic team has long argued he inherited the recession from the Clinton administration. Some 2.2 million jobs have been lost since Mr Bush took office in January 2001, and the jobs issue looms large in Mr Bush's quest to be re-elected in November.
The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee has ruled the downturn began in March 2001 and ended in November that year. But it is considering rolling back the start because revised data now show the economy first contracted in the third quarter of 2000, rather than the first quarter of 2001.
A spokeswoman for the NBER said there was no plan "at this time" to change the date of the recession, and shrugged off the White House's assertion that the slump began earlier.
"They can say whatever they like, we haven't changed our date yet. That doesn't mean that we won't sometime in the future, but we have not yet," NBER spokeswoman Donna Zerwitz said. She added that members of the dating committee were still discussing the issue.
The White House said the median date of the peak of monthly gross domestic product, personal income, payroll employment, industrial production and manufacturing and trade sales data is October 2000.
"Other data support the notion that economic activity had slowed sharply or even begun to decline by this point, including the stock market, business investment, and initial unemployment claims," it said in the report.
"For these reasons (we)... use the fourth quarter of 2000 as the peak of economic activity and the start of the recession."
Economists have said the sluggish rebound in employment growth since the end of the recession is quite unusual by historical standards, and the so-called "jobless recovery" has become a hot-button political issue.
Democrats have regularly charged Mr Bush with having the worst jobs creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover.
In the only other post-war jobless recovery, the slow crawl back from the 1990-91 recession, it took 14 months for the number of employed to rebound to the level when the recession ended. This time, it is 26 months and counting.