In an alarming development, President Donald Trump on Friday fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer after accusing the economic researcher of manipulating the jobs data for political purposes.
A White House official confirmed the firing to ABC News and other outlets.
Trump provided zero evidence to support his earlier, extraordinary accusations against McEntarfer, which he shared in a social media post on Friday.
The Senate confirmed McEntarfer to the position in 2024 by a vote of 86-8.
Trump’s unhinged, on-again, off-again tariff scheme led to an unexpectedly weak jobs report, with the BLS revising May and June payrolls to show the U.S. added 258,000 fewer jobs than it originally tallied. Instead of acknowledging that his economic policies might be responsible for the economic health that results, Trump attacked the economists.
A HuffPost analysis of the data found Trump delivered the worst three months of job growth since the pandemic.
“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” the president wrote in a social media post. “The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’ despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected – How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump has long attacked and portrayed as “fake” anything that casts him in a less-than-flattering light — even, it seems, raw data.
A Washington Post tally from Trump’s first term found he called jobs numbers “fake,” “phony,” or some other version of fraudulent 19 times. But firing civil servants who compile that data is a massive and troubling escalation.
It should be noted that the BLS regularly revises data, including job numbers, as more data becomes available to more accurately assess the overall health of the economy, even in retrospect.