On Friday, August 1, President Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer from her role as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In social media posts announcing and confirming her firing, he said that he believed the jobs report released by the agency earlier that day included numbers that were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
BLS is one of the federal government’s most important statistical agencies. Partly in order to avoid politicizing the agency’s work, the agency falls under the larger Department of Labor but operates autonomously, without direction from DOL, staffed largely by career civil servant economists and other researchers who conduct and analyze detailed surveys about the U.S. labor force and economy. While McEntarfer was appointed to her role by President Biden, she was confirmed with a bipartisan vote of 86 Senators, including then-Senator JD Vance, to serve for a 4-year term that began in January 2024.
Most notably, BLS regularly surveys households, businesses, and government agencies to produce a monthly report known as the “jobs report” – the number of jobs the US economy grew or lost in a given month. BLS also collects and releases data on wages, the number of hours worked, inflation, and more. This data is incredibly difficult and complex to measure, and incredibly important for policymakers at the state and local level, the private sector in the U.S. and around the world, and the public to understand what is happening in the U.S.’s very large economy and to make decisions based on the reliability of that data. The firing of the BLS commissioner follows a week of reporting that almost 20% of price inflation data was unable to be collected for the month of July, stemming from severe resource constraints, in part after the agency has not been granted its true budget needs by Congress.
“The president’s belief that the BLS commissioner personally ‘produced’ the jobs numbers is preposterous and shows a complete misunderstanding of how government statistical agencies operate,” Heidi Shierholz, EPI President, said in a statement. Trump’s move also risks politicizing the office of Commissioner in the future, by threatening their removal if any economic statistical data released does not seem favorable to the White House.