Trump fires Bureau of Labor Statistics chief over revised jobs data

US President Donald Trump has fired Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) chief Erika McEntarfer, citing unemployment data as the reason.

Trump’s decision followed a report that revealed a significant slowdown in job growth and revised the employment data for May and June downward.

In response to objections from Democratic senators, the Department of Labor issued general statements affirming its commitment to “providing accurate, timely, and impartial economic statistics.”

According to a statement obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the senators were requesting detailed information on issues such as staffing shortages at the BLS and their potential impact on data accuracy.

The BLS acknowledged that it has ceased price data collection activities in three US cities and reported an average data deficiency of 15% in other locations. The reason cited for this shortfall was a personnel shortage caused by a federal government hiring freeze.

This level of incomplete data collection marks a significant increase from the 5% rate reported during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, as noted in a review by a BLS economist.

Fed officials, investors, and businesses rely heavily on BLS inflation figures to determine monetary policy and investment decisions. Fed Chair Jerome Powell emphasized the critical role these statistics play in economic forecasting, stating that they are “monitoring the situation.”

Although the BLS’s internal analyses indicate that these data deficiencies have not distorted headline inflation figures, Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights, argued in the Wall Street Journal report that this analysis does not reflect the severity of the problem. “This does not reflect the true extent of inflation,” he said.

In a statement, the White House said, “The BLS was forced to revise its employment reports for May and June downward by a total of 258,000 people. These erroneous employment reports allowed the Federal Reserve to continue its policy of keeping interest rates high.”

On Sunday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett rejected the claim that Trump was “shooting the messenger” and questioned the accuracy of the much weaker job figures than previously reported.

“The president wants his own people in there so that when we see the numbers, they are more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett said on NBC’s Meet the Press, describing the downward revision of job growth for May and June as “unprecedented” and a “historically significant outlier.”

“And if there are big changes and big revisions, then we want to know why. We want people to explain that to us,” he added.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Hassett again cast doubt on the official figures, suggesting without evidence that employment statistics can sometimes contain “partisan biases.”

“I think the BLS needs a fresh perspective, someone who can clean this up,” Hassett said in the interview.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also defended Trump’s dismissal of McEntarfer, stating that the president had “real concerns” about the employment data.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that the dismissed BLS chief, Erika McEntarfer, had made “the biggest calculation error in over 50 years,” citing Friday’s “horrendous unemployment numbers” as the latest example.

The president alleged that the official “did the same thing right before the presidential election, pushing the employment numbers to an all-time high.”

“I still won the election, and then she readjusted the numbers downward, calling it a mistake and saying it was a loss of almost a million jobs. A SCAM! She did the same thing again, with another big ‘correction,’ and she was FIRED!” Trump added.

Meanwhile, in a statement on Friday, the “Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” a group co-led by former BLS directors William Beach and Erica L. Groshen, accused Trump of politicizing the statistical agency and undermining confidence in official government data.

“The official statistics of the US are the gold standard worldwide,” the group asserted. “When leaders of other countries have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and the government’s scientific data.”