Trump Fires BLS Head, Raising Concerns About Future Data Quality

Trump later posted that he believes the numbers were “RIGGED” to make Republicans and him look bad. He took it as an opportunity to once again criticize Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump has berated repeatedly for not lowering interest rates. The central bank held borrowing costs steady for a fifth straight meeting when they convened last Wednesday. All else equal, the weak jobs data and revisions actually make a rate cut much more likely. Traders now see a nearly 90 percent chance that the Fed will reduce rates at its next meeting in September, more than double the odds a day earlier.

Swift Criticism of the Firing

Economists who have served under both parties were quick to jump to the defense of McEntarfer, as well as the BLS as an institution. While the commissioner role is appointed by the president, the BLS describes its work as “independent” and “non-partisan.” Economists and statisticians say this impartiality is key to the public and market’s trust in the data, as trillions of dollars can trade on the numbers at any given time. The statistical agency is often praised, both in the United States and abroad, for its “gold standard” statistics that are free of political influence. Many now fear that status is at stake.

Trump’s directive to fire McEntarfer also garnered swift criticism from Democrats including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer. Her predecessor, William Beach, who was appointed during the first Trump administration, called the firing “totally groundless” and said it sets a “dangerous precedent.” Beach co-chairs the advocacy group Friends of BLS, which released a statement Friday saying they “stand firmly behind the BLS, Commissioner McEntarfer, and the data they work hard to produce. ... To politicize the work of the agency and its workers does a great disservice not only to BLS but to the entire federal statistical system which this country has relied on for almost 150 years.”

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was resolute in McEntarfer’s defense, saying “there’s just absolutely no evidence” that she had any desire to fake the number, and to do so would have been “impossible.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who’s served in senior roles across the administrations of Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump, acknowledged that the president has the right to choose his own team but underscored the professionalism of the BLS career staff. “On Friday, November 1, the last release before the election, BLS announced that only 12,000 jobs were created. If these data were being manipulated to help President Biden, BLS would have picked a higher number,” Furchtgott-Roth said. “However, I’m sure the data collection process could be improved with more funding.”

Like her counterparts in other U.S. statistical offices, McEntarfer has had to contend with tight budgets and staffing constraints—challenges that predate Trump but have grown more acute in his second term. BLS funding has slumped about 20 percent since 2010, adjusted for inflation, and Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal would shave an additional 8 percent from both its purse and personnel. McEntarfer’s tenure was also marked by several data-release incidents and mishaps in 2024, which raised questions about the dissemination of sensitive information and prompted an independent review of the agency.

Nevertheless, the downward revision to payrolls was largely a result of seasonal adjustment for state and local government education, BLS said in earlier comments to Bloomberg. Those sectors substantially boosted June employment, only to be largely revised away a month later.

These revisions proved larger than normal, but jobs figures are routinely revised. The BLS payrolls survey polls firms over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. While Trump has decried the revisions, BLS economist Lindsay Walk told Bloomberg they “represent a more complete, and therefore more accurate, picture of developments in the labor market.”

Other economists say the revisions released on Friday point to a more concerning underlying issue of low response rates. A smaller share of businesses have been responding to the first of the three BLS polls. Thus, initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60 percent in recent months—down from the roughly 70 percent or more that was the norm before the pandemic.

In addition to the rolling revisions to payrolls that BLS does, there’s also a larger annual revision that comes out each February to benchmark the figures to a more accurate, but less timely, data source. BLS puts out a preliminary estimate of what that revision will be a few months in advance, and last year, that projection was the largest since 2009. Trump alluded to those revisions in his initial post Friday. Last November, the updates also drew condemnation from key Republican senators Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy.

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