The commissioner was fired after the July job report was weaker than expected, which also contained significant downward revisions for the previous two months.
McEntarfer Fired: Trump Cuts Labor Statistics Commissioner
President Donald Trump wasted no time firing Labor Statistics Agency (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Friday after a disappointing jobs report caused stocks to drop. Trump claimed McEntarfer had 'falsified' data to make the president 'look bad.'
McEntarfer earned her Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. The 52-year-old woman has worked as an economist at several government agencies, including the Census Bureau and the Council of Economic Advisers. Former President Joe Biden nominated McEntarfer as BLS commissioner in 2023. She was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in January 2024.
(Former Labor Statistics Agency commissioner Erika McEntarfer was fired on Friday for allegedly 'falsifying' the July job report to make President Donald Trump 'look bad.')
But according to Trump, trouble began to arise in the November 2024 election. The president accused McEntarfer of manipulating employment data to bolster the Biden administration's record before the election took place, then he said she had revised the numbers down after Trump won.
'In my view, today's employment numbers have been LEANED to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,' the president wrote on Truth Social on Friday. 'Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 presidential election, and then those numbers were 'taken away' on November 15, 2024, right after the election, when the employment numbers were MASSIVELY revised down, resulting in a downward adjustment of over 818,000 jobs — A TOTAL FABRICATION.'
But others deny Trump's allegations, which have not been supported by any credible evidence. Even former BLS commissioner William Beach, who was appointed by Trump, has criticized the president's actions. 'There can be no influence from the commissioner,' Beach said in an NBC interview. 'The commissioner does not see the numbers until they are completely finalized.'
The Friends of the BLS, an independent organization supporting the Bureau and chaired by Beach, Paul Schroeder, and Erica Groshen, condemned McEntarfer's firing in an official statement, calling the president's allegations 'baseless.' The organization also issued a warning, cautioning about a decline in trust in U.S. economic data if the BLS becomes partisan.
'The reasons for firing Dr. McEntarfer are without merit and undermine the credibility of federal economic statistics,' the statement read. 'When leaders of other countries politicize economic data, it destroys public trust in all official statistics and in government science.'
But Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council, defended Trump's move in an NBC interview on Sunday, accusing that the BLS has become increasingly poor with their calculations since the Covid pandemic.
'When Covid hit, due to the response rate dropping so much... the rate of revisions skyrocketed,' Hassett explained. He also claimed that the downward revisions of 258,000 jobs on Friday from the previous totals for May and June were the most significant revisions 'since 1965.' 'What we need is a fresh look at the BLS,' Hassett said.
