Trump says the BLS is rigged. The fired chief blames DOGE. Which is it? 
The Wall Street Journal reports Fired BLS Chief Breaks Silence, Calls Her Dismissal a ‘Dangerous Step’
Erika McEntarfer was fired Aug. 1 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics after Trump complained about massive downward revisions to the number of jobs created during the spring. The president accused her of manipulating the data to make him look bad, which economists have refuted.
McEntarfer pointed to what she called “not a good list” of other countries where statisticians have been pushed out over disappointing statistics, including Argentina, Greece and Turkey.
“The resulting loss of trust in economic statistics led these countries to worsening economic crises, higher inflation and higher borrowing costs,” she said.
While speaking to students at her alma mater, Bard College, McEntarfer said she took the helm of BLS last year with high hopes of improving the stats on employment and inflation that the agency produces. Instead, she wound up spending much of 2025 guarding it against interference from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team.
“I went from big-picture reformer to being on the defensive pretty quickly,” McEntarfer said. “We navigated more crises in a week than you see in a year in normal times.” Keeping the agency operational turned into “a constant high-wire act,” she added.
When he fired her, the president said that McEntarfer had led an effort to falsify economic statistics and hurt him politically, a charge that former BLS officials from both parties have dismissed as impossible.
McEntarfer acknowledged that during her 18-month tenure, the BLS faced challenges that had been building for years, including tight budgets, staffing shortages and fewer responses to the massive economic surveys upon which much of its reporting is based. Since January, the BLS’s staff has shrunk by 20%, fallout from a hiring freeze that has stalled onboarding across the federal government, she said.
Critics of the agency, which produces the unemployment rate, the consumer-price index, and other stats that investors and businesses rely on monthly, have argued that it is overly reliant on 20th-century techniques. The BLS mostly uses phone calls to ask people about their job status and sends workers to check prices on store shelves manually.
McEntarfer, who spent most of her career working to improve statistics quality at the Census Bureau, said she had been aiming to tackle those problems as BLS commissioner before she was fired.
“I was prepared to help BLS modernize data collection,” she said.
Falsifying Data Charge
Trump says the data was rigged. The charge is preposterous.
Dozens of BLS workers gather the data, and every one of them would need to be in on the conspiracy.
The odds of that happening, with no one squawking is zero.
Modernization Needed
Without a doubt BLS techniques need a complete overhaul.
Serious flaws include the Birth-Death model, sampling errors, and QCEW numbers that should be seasonally adjusted but aren’t.
Since January, the BLS’s staff has shrunk by 20 percent thanks to DOGE.
How likely is modernization when it takes more staff than the BLS has just to handle the mess the BLS is already in?
Once again, the answer is zero.
One can make a case that government should not be involved in this at all. If so, then fire them all and be done with it.
But if you expect government to modernize, it’s not going to happen by cutting staff while already understaffed.
Beyond Modernization
What ails the BLS goes far beyond modernization. It’s no good to modernize the collection of nonsense. More timely garbage is still garbage.
Some of the unemployment issues are well understood.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is an even bigger mess because most economists are clueless about what it should measure.
With the CPI, we need to start over. What we really need is an Inflation Index (II) because inflation matters, not just consumer inflation.
I have been meaning to write up specific proposals for both. I will get to my BLS overhaul suggestions next week.
Fired for Being the Messenger
On August 2, I asked Did Trump Fire the BLS Head for Cause, Being the Messenger, or Something Else?
“The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference.”
The answer of course is being the messenger.
BLS Chief New Job Requirement
On August 5, I noted the BLS Chief New Job Requirement, Be a Trump Loyalist, the Pay Is $195,000
Hoot of the Day
Trump says the economy is doing fine and the job weakness is rigged.
But if the weakness is rigged, then what’s the case for a Fed rate cut?
The crying baby wants it both ways. Jobs are rigged by the BLS to look weak, but they are really strong. Yet, too-late Powell should be cutting. What a hoot.
How many caught this bit of hypocritical nonsense?