\u201cFiring your chief statistician is a dangerous step,\u201d McEntarfer said during a lecture she gave at Bard College, her alma mater. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability,\u201d she said, adding that interfering with economic data \u201cis like messing with the traffic lights.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/TBEJ53PPVBH7ZHRTZQNYN5VV6I.jpg\")
Donald Trump has sought to undermine confidence in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, firing its commissioner on August 1 and directing his advisors to prepare a report on alleged shortcomings at the bureau. Win McNamee\/Getty Images <\/p>\n
\u201cCars don\u2019t know where to go, traffic backs up at intersections.\u201d <\/p>\n
The BLS tracks employment and inflation, publishing monthly reports on the former that are based on surveying both workers and businesses. <\/p>\n
The bureau\u2019s monthly jobs report for July showed that the U.S. added 73,000 new jobs, a slowdown in growth. It also revised down the jobs figures for May and June, from 140,000 to 19,000 and from 147,000 to 14,000, respectively. <\/p>\n
While jobs report revisions are common fare, Trump immediately accused McEntarfer of fudging the numbers. <\/p>\n
\u201cI have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,\u201d Trump fired off on Truth Social just six hours after the report became public. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,\u201d Trump wrote. \u201cImportant numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can\u2019t be manipulated for political purposes.\u201d <\/p>\n
![\"President](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1758139871_1_J2G7WFPC6FBZBPCZLUFAJTLULE.JPG\")
President Trump booted Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer out of her job on August 1 after a poor July jobs report. She had served less than two years of the customary four-year term. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics\/Handout via Reuters <\/p>\n
McEntarfer was confirmed by an 86-8 vote in the Senate in January 2024, after serving for two decades in various nonpolitical roles across Republican and Democratic administrations.<\/p>\n
She said on Tuesday that Trump\u2019s outburst came a day after she briefed members of the White House on the numbers and received what she called \u201cnormal\u201d questions from the economists there. <\/p>\n
While there, she explained that large jobs revisions, like the ones affecting the May and June numbers, tend to happen \u201cwhen the economy slows.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day, she was out. <\/p>\n
The White House\u2019s own chief economist, Stephen Miran, said that the July figures were \u201cless than ideal\u201d and made no mention of any problems in the report\u2019s methodology. <\/p>\n
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement, \u201cFor years the BLS has been failing America\u2019s businesses, policymakers, and families by publishing jobs reports with vastly inaccurate data.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe prior leadership at the BLS did not take any action to increase response rates or modernize data collection methods to improve the agency\u2019s accuracy,\u201d Rogers continued. \u201cThese problems have existed for years and President Trump is actually taking steps to fix them.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"E.J.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/F4Y3STN4VBE35KL73RHNOABRSM.png\")
EJ Antoni, Trump’s nominee to take over as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the Capitol on January 6. Truth Social\/Parler\/ProPublica <\/p>\n
After firing McEntarfer, Trump tabbed a MAGA loyalist to lead the bureau, E.J. Antoni, who economists from both sides of the aisle labelled as unqualified for the role. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job. E.J. is not one of them,\u201d wrote one economist on X from the right-leaning Tax Foundation. <\/p>\n
Antoni was also spotted at the Capitol<\/a> on January 6, when he was working as an economist for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.<\/p>\n The White House told NBC that Antoni, 37, was \u201cobserving\u201d the mob gathering there and did not engage in \u201canything inappropriate or illegal.\u201d <\/p>\n Antoni generated more negative headlines for the administration due to a photo<\/a> hanging in his office of a Nazi battleship and the discovery of old social media accounts where he posted lurid conspiracy theories<\/a> about Democratic politicians. <\/p>\n McEntarfer questioned on Tuesday whether the independence of the BLS will hold up in the wake of Trump\u2019s attacks on the bureau and Antoni\u2019s track record of partisanship. <\/p>\n \u201cAfter the events of the last six weeks, I\u2019m afraid we have to fear for the dependence of the agencies themselves,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Labor market conditions have continued to worsen since McEntarfer\u2019s firing, with the most recent BLS report released earlier this month showing that unemployment crept up to 4.3%\u2014the highest it\u2019s been since April 2021. <\/p>\n That report also showed that there was a net loss of jobs in June, which hadn\u2019t happened since the depths of the pandemic in December 2020. <\/p>\n Many economists say that Trump\u2019s tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which were imposed starting in the spring, are the primary culprit for the receding employment figures. <\/p>\n \u201cThis disappointing number is a result of all the turmoil of tariffs and trade wars,\u201d said Stephen Moore, an economics fellow at the Heritage Foundation, after the August jobs report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The government statistician President Trump fired for releasing a gloomy jobs report last month warned that her firing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431959,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3090],"tags":[35906,51,1700,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-431958","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-bureau-of-labor-statistics","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115221462864528504","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"E.J.](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/JYQWCBLQ4NEANMPLNAJ6L4A5V4.png\")
Antoni posted this in response to an edited, sexually explicit Kamala Harris campaign poster in 2019. @PhDofbombsaway \/ Twitter (via Wayback Machine) <\/p>\n