Condemn Trump’s Firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner

On August 1st, Trump personally directed his administration to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This comes after the BLS released the latest jobs report which showed a significantly weakened economy — a gain of only 73,000 jobs for July, downward revisions to the May and June reported gains, and an uptick in the unemployment rate to 4.2%. These numbers mark the steepest slow down of US job growth since the pandemic. Trump subsequently accused McEntarfer of “rigging” the data to make him “look bad” and announced that his administration would immediately replace her.

There is no evidence that McEntarfer manipulated the BLS numbers; Trump’s own top economic advisor Stephen Miran accepted the numbers on CNN. Economists have consistently reasoned that stubborn inflation, federal government cuts, and Trump’s constant flip-flopping on tariffs would create detrimental uncertainty across the economy. Additionally, the labor market is losing immigrant workers due to Trump’s aggressive deportation operation.

Not only is Trump’s clearly politically motivated firing of McEntarfer grossly authoritarian, it endangers the trustworthiness of the BLS’s “gold standard” economic data that is widely used in both the public and private sectors around the world to make decisions. Congress must now take action to protect the nonpartisan reliability of the BLS and hold Trump accountable for this blatant attempt to manipulate economic data to protect himself politically.