In Firing the BLS Chief, Trump Escalates His Administration’s War on Data

President Trump’s firing of Commissioner of Labor Statistics Erika McEntarfer last Friday brought into laser focus how willing he is to manipulate federal data in his favor. 

McEntarfer’s dismissal came just hours after a monthly jobs report showed the labor market performed more sluggishly than previously reported. The revisions were large, but not without precedent. Trump’s decision to target McEntarfer, however, will undoubtedly make the history books.

The second Trump administration has spent its first months trying to rewrite America’s story into a whitewashed, ahistorical national account. Officials yanked down and removed racial and ethnicity breakdowns from a federal employee database, took federal government datasets offline, and blocked the release of a report that projected a trade deficit for farm goods. Federal staffing cuts initiated by the administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, purged vital departments of institutional knowledge and expertise. 

But Trump’s firing of the BLS chief escalated his administration’s attack on information. Though researchers who rely on federal economic data say it’s too early to declare U.S. economic data untrustworthy, public trust in these essential information collection systems has been weakened.

“This is a watershed moment in terms of federal statistics and federal data,” Paul Schroeder, a federal data and statistics expert, told TPM. “This type of thing is not supposed to happen.”

Trump’s actions, said Hayley Brown, a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “are textbook authoritarian maneuvers.” 

“They’re changing definitions to make [their] regime look better, silencing independent statisticians, economists, and scientists,” said Brown, who has written about Trump’s destruction of federal data. “Firing the BLS commissioner is extremely alarming, but it’s also just another escalation in Trump’s authoritarian attitude toward federal data.”

While many Republican lawmakers joined Trump in criticizing McEntarfer, some derided Trump’s decision to politicize BLS data. 

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY). 

Whoever made the decision to oust McEntarfer “ought to grow up,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has spoken out more frequently against Trump since announcing he won’t seek re-election.

Trump in a Tuesday morning CNBC interview defended his actions. “It’s a highly political situation,” Trump said of the BLS numbers. “It’s totally rigged.”

Economists predicted for months that the amalgam of Trump’s economic policies — from widespread, unpredictable tariffs, to the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, to sweeping jobs cuts at the federal government — would lead to a tangible slowdown. The U.S. economy, though, remained resilient as inflation stayed more or less low and companies seemed to continue hiring. The White House declared Trump was “supercharging the U.S. economy.”

The BLS jobs report contradicted the administration’s narrative. Significant negative changes to jobs numbers likely mean the economy is finally slowing down, said Schroeder, the executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

“When you see a drop in the numbers or you see downward revisions like we’ve seen over the past couple of months, this is an indication of something that’s going on with the economy,” he said.

July’s release decreased the number of jobs added in May and June by 125,000 and 133,000 respectively, for a net increase of just 33,000 compared to 291,000 as initially reported.

To compile their payroll numbers, BLS surveys more than 121,000 businesses and government agencies to cover about 631,000 worksites, according to its methodology posted to its website. 

Hailed by experts for its organizational transparency, the BLS website explains agency data collection, seasonal adjustments and revisions, sampling errors and any collections issues. In an interview with NPR’s The Indicator podcast, former BLS commissioner Bill Beach said about 68% of surveyed firms respond to BLS outreach each month. Beach suggested that the recent revisions of the  May and June jobs numbers were likely a result of some businesses turning in their surveys after the deadline.

“And once the reason becomes apparent,” said Beach, who served during Trump’s first presidency and under former President Joe Biden, “I think people will begin to say, Oh yeah, that makes sense.”

As is his custom, Trump took last Friday’s jobs report as a personal attack. 

He accused McEntarfer of manipulating jobs numbers to hurt him in the 2024 election, a claim debunked by PolitiFact. “Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats.” 

Abby André, a former DOJ attorney who worked under Trump and former President Barack Obama administration, said these kinds of claims erode public trust.  

“It is increasingly clear that changes in data practices are creating concerns about reliability,” said André, who created The Impact Project at the beginning of Trump’s second term to track the localized impacts of DOGE cuts. 

“It makes it feel like households and businesses can’t get their hands around what’s happening in the economy, which makes it really difficult to make good choices,” André said.