President Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images).
President Donald Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief on Friday, following a lackluster jobs report that indicated the U.S. economy might be much more feeble than anticipated.
The president accused BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer without evidence of manufacturing jobs data to damage his political standing. The latest jobs report released Friday showed that the U.S. economy added 73,000 jobs in July with significant downward revisions for the prior two months. The data combined to illustrate a flagging economy due to amplified business uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, which are set to spike into the double-digits for most countries next week.
McEntarfer was appointed by Biden in 2024 with BLS commissioners serving four-year terms.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
The president was later asked by reporters outside the White House why he ousted the BLS chief. "Because I thought her numbers were wrong," he responded.
A White House official told Quartz that Trump approached the decision as a businessman firing an incompetent employee, citing major BLS revisions since the pandemic.
However, those revisions are updates that reflect more information coming in from a sizable sample of businesses reporting who is getting paid and who isn't.
Trump’s BLS purge drew swift rebukes from analysts and economists across the ideological spectrum and elevated concerns of political interference with data that angers Trump. William Beach, an ex-BLS commissioner appointed under Trump, called McEntarfer’s firing “without merit” and a decision that threatened to undermine the credibility of nonpartisan government data.
“The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news,” Beach said in a statement posted through Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan group. “The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show.”
Some Republicans were also critical of the move. “It seems a little impetuous,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming told Quartz. “Statistics are what they are.”
She added these were “turbulent times” in the U.S. economy. “We've created some of the turbulence, and so it should be expected there would be some ups and downs associated with job markets,” Lummis said.
“A person shouldn’t be fired for telling the truth,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told Quartz.
Meanwhile, Democrats assailed the move as the latest authoritarian maneuver from Trump. “Just absolutely insane,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii told reporters. “The economy’s tanking and he’s terrified, he’s acting like a dictator.”
Another compared it to a move more reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of Nevada called it "Pure Soviet [sh—t]" in an X $TWTR post. Then Sen. Ron Wyden, ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, warned against Senate confirmation of a “Trump lackey” to be the next BLS chief.
Economists say that political interference with the government’s statistical infrastructure usually carries very damaging consequences for economic decision-making. Take Argentina, which has long struggled to quell inflation. In 2007, Argentine President Nestor Kirschner fired the agency head responsible for reporting inflation data and installed an acolyte.
For nine years, Argentines designed alternate ways to measure price changes since they no longer trusted the government data. "Citizens didn't buy it,” Brendan Duke $DUK, an economist at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Quartz.
The International Monetary Fund later threatened to deprive Buenos Aires of its access to foreign capital and eject it from the organization due to the false data. “Nobody actually believes the statistics, and I think that shows how short-sighted the approach President Trump is taking could end up," Duke said.
“The U.S. is the envy of the world bc of our high-quality govt data and trust it is not subject to political manipulation,” said Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor and ex-Biden administration official. “What took generations to build can be destroyed quickly.”
