President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics hours after a report showed weak job growth, prompting outcries from economists and policymakers over the integrity of the data going forward.
In a social media post Friday, Trump said he directed his team to fire Erika McEntarfer — who was appointed by Joe Biden — “IMMEDIATELY.” He went on to say that “important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
Economists who have served under both parties were quick to jump to McEntarfer’s defence, as well as the BLS as an institution. The statistical agency is often praised both in the US and abroad for its “gold standard” statistics that are free of political influence. Many now fear that status is at stake.
Friday’s jobs report from the BLS showed payrolls increased 73,000 in July after the prior two months were revised down by nearly 260,000. In the past three months, employment growth has averaged a paltry 35,000 — the worst since the pandemic.
The BLS confirmed that McEntarfer was terminated Friday in an email to Bloomberg News. She was confirmed in January of 2024, an election year, by a vote of 86-8, with then-Senator JD Vance voting “yea.”
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William Wiatrowski, deputy BLS commissioner, will serve as acting BLS chief for now, said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Her department oversees BLS.
While the commissioner role is appointed by the president, BLS describes its work as “independent” and “non-partisan.” Economists and statisticians say this impartiality is key to the public and market’s trust in the data, as trillions of dollars can trade on the numbers at any given time.
Trump later posted that he believes the numbers were “RIGGED” to make Republicans and him look bad. He took it as an opportunity to once again criticise Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who Trump has berated repeatedly for not lowering interest rates. The central bank held borrowing costs steady for a fifth straight meeting when they convened Wednesday.
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The weak jobs data and revisions, all else equal, actually make a rate cut much more likely. Traders now see a nearly 90% chance that the Fed will reduce rates at its next meeting in September, more than double the odds a day earlier.
Separately, Fed Governor Adriana Kugler announced that she will step down from her position on the central bank’s board effective Aug 8. That will present Trump with an immediate opportunity to select a nominee for her seat.
Swift Criticism
Trump’s directive to fire McEntarfer garnered swift criticism from Democrats including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer. Her predecessor, William Beach, who was appointed during the first Trump administration, called the firing “totally groundless” and that it sets a “dangerous precedent.”
Beach co-chairs the advocacy group, Friends of BLS, which released a statement Friday saying they “stand firmly behind the BLS, Commissioner McEntarfer, and the data they work hard to produce.”
“To politicise the work of the agency and its workers does a great disservice not only to BLS but to the entire federal statistical system which this country has relied on for almost 150 years,” the group said in a statement.
Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was resolute in McEntarfer’s defence, saying “there’s just absolutely no evidence” that she had any desire to fake the number, and to do so would have been “impossible.”
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who’s served in senior roles across the administrations of Reagan, both Bushes and Trump, acknowledged Trump has the right to choose his own team but underscored the professionalism of the BLS career staff.
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“On Friday Nov 1, the last release before the election, BLS announced that only 12,000 jobs were created. If these data were being manipulated to help President Biden, BLS would have picked a higher number,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “However, I’m sure the data collection process could be improved with more funding.”
Budget Constraints
Like her counterparts in other US statistical offices, McEntarfer has had to contend with tight budgets and staffing constraints — challenges that predate Trump but have grown more acute in his second term. BLS funding has slumped about 20% since 2010 once adjusted for inflation, and Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would shave an additional 8% from both its purse and personnel.
The downward revision to the prior two months was largely a result of seasonal adjustment for state and local government education, BLS said in earlier comments to Bloomberg. Those sectors substantially boosted June employment only to be largely revised away a month later.
Though the revisions proved larger than normal, jobs figures are routinely revised. BLS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond.
While Trump has decried the revisions, BLS economist Lindsay Walk told Bloomberg they “represent a more complete, and therefore more accurate, picture of developments in the labour market.”
Other economists say the revisions also point to a more concerning, underlying issue of low response rates. A smaller share of businesses have been responding to the first of those three polls. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.
In addition to the rolling revisions to payrolls that BLS does, there’s also a larger annual revision that comes out each February to benchmark the figures to a more accurate, but less timely data source. BLS puts out a preliminary estimate of what that revision will be a few months in advance, and last year, that projection was the largest since 2009.
Trump alluded to those revisions in his initial post Friday, which also drew condemnation from key Republican senators at the time.
