Trump fires labor statistics chief after weak jobs report

• In a statement, the BLS confirmed that commissioner Erika McEntarfer was "terminated" on Friday. It named longtime BLS official William Wiatrowski as the acting head of the agency.

The big picture: Government statistics agencies are historically insulated from politics, so they can accomplish the deeply technical task of tallying up activity in a $30 trillion, 160 million-job economy.

• It came after BLS reported that the U.S. added only 73,000 jobs in July and sharply revised downward its May and June job growth estimates.
• Without evidence, the president accused McEntarfer, a 20-year government veteran who was elevated to that job in the Biden administration, of distorting the numbers for political purposes.
• Her predecessor as BLS commissioner, William Beach, who was appointed in 2019 by Trump, posted to X that her firing "sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau."
• Jed Kolko, a former Commerce Department official overseeing government statistics, said on Bluesky that firing McEntarfer "is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system."

Driving the news: "I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

• "She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can't be manipulated for political purposes."
• "McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months."
• "Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The Economy is BOOMING under "TRUMP" despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates."
• The president added in a subsequent post: "In my opinion, today's Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad."

The intrigue: In an interview with Axios, top White House economist Stephen Miran said the BLS needed "fresh eyes" to address huge revisions that undermine the reliability of the jobs data.

• But he stopped short of repeating the assertion that the numbers were rigged: "I think if the BLS tells me that there were 14,000 jobs created [in June], I don't have a competing survey that tells me otherwise."

Reality check: BLS is considered the gold standard among international labor data collectors. Economists consider its revisions process key to transparency and thoroughness, even if it sometimes makes BLS look bad when preliminary numbers turn out to be wildly off.

• The establishment survey, on which the job growth numbers are based, comes from monthly contact with 121,000 employers nationwide, asking them how many workers are on their payrolls, how many hours they worked, and so forth.
• The agency revises the numbers after evaluating information that wasn't available at the time of the initial report.
• That includes information from businesses that don't respond before the report is released. The BLS continues to take reports from those businesses, which inform the revisions published in the following two months.
• The unemployment rate, however, is not revised monthly.

The revisions, which have been conducted since 1979, can be so large that they change the perspective of the current state of economy, especially if a large company is late to report payrolls data.

• The Labor Department also recalculates seasonal factors, a statistical quirk that aims to remove the seasonal patterns — weather, holidays school schedules and the like — that can influence employment trends.
• The jobs numbers are also benchmarked yearly against unemployment insurance filings, to ensure that the survey data lines up with actual employment as reflected in administrative records.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional detail throughout.