President Donald Trump has fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), after the agency reported that fewer jobs were added in May, June and July than projected.
Following the August 1 firing, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the most recent job numbers were “rigged” to make him look bad, and that numbers had been “rigged” last year to help Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. (Days before the election, BLS had reported that only 12,000 jobs had been added in October.)
“Last weeks [sic] Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, this week. “I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!”
The head of BLS during Trump’s first term, William Beach, said “there’s no way” the commissioner can manipulate the numbers.
“The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers,” Beach said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.”
The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Beach co-chairs, released a statement urging Congress to investigate the firing. The organization describes itself as a “voice to express support for BLS as an institution so that it can continue to help everyone make wise choices.”
The group called Trump’s accusations against McEntarfer “baseless” and “damaging.”
“The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news,” the group said. “To politicize 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 truth has never gotten in the way of Trump’s conspiracy theories. Before he became president, he claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and had faked his birth certificate — both of which are categorically untrue. After Trump lost the presidential election in 2020, he insisted that the election had been stolen, a lie that paved the way for the January 6 insurrection.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned the firing, along with progressive and conservative economists. Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis said, “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called the firing a “five alarm fire.”
“He doesn’t like the data about the economy because they show his policies are a disaster,” Baker wrote. “Rather than re-examine his policies, he wants to change the data, and he will try to find people who give him the data he wants.”
The president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Heidi Shierholz, said that Trump’s actions were “a move straight out of an autocratic playbook.”
“To fire her over an official data release — simply because the numbers do not serve a particular political narrative — is a deeply dangerous attack on the foundations of a functioning democracy,” she said in a statement.
Shierholz warned that Trump’s actions will have “dangerous” consequences for the economy and will “be felt by working people first.”
“If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data — or suspect the data are being manipulated — confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible,” she said. “This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession — and soaring unemployment — far more likely in coming months.”
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