Trump fires labor statistics chief after large revision to jobs report
Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was ousted after revised data showed higher unemployment in May and June.
Updated
August 1, 2025 at 9:14 p.m. EDT31 minutes ago
By Andrew Ackerman and Jacob Bogage
President Donald Trump on Friday said he ordered the dismissal of the official in charge of compiling basic statistics about the U.S. economy after the release of a soft jobs report that showed lackluster July employment growth and revealed large downward revisions for hiring in May and June.
Trump, who announced McEntarfer’s ouster on social media, criticized her as a Biden appointee overseeing what he falsely called “faked” jobs numbers. He said he would replace McEntarfer with someone “more competent and qualified.”
Without evidence, he alleged the jobs numbers had been manipulated for political purposes.
(Every accusation is a confession...)
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The firing came just hours after the BLS reported that the job market was far weaker than previously believed. Large cuts to earlier job counts erased 258,000 positions originally reported for May and June, marking the steepest two-month downward revision on record outside the pandemic. July figures were also below expectations, highlighting an economy struggling under new tariffs and aggressive immigration restrictions.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said in a social media post that “a recent string of major revisions have come to light and raised concerns about decisions being made” by McEntarfer, whom she described as “the Biden-appointed Labor Commissioner.” Deputy Labor Statistics Commissioner William Wiatrowski will serve as acting commissioner during a search to permanently fill the position, Chavez-DeRemer said. Wiatrowski served as the acting commissioner twice before.
Neither McEntarfer nor a BLS representative immediately responded to requests for comment.
“The president is just shooting the messenger, it’s not more complicated than that,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the right-leaning American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “The data that were released today conformed in every way to the standards of past employment reports.”
Revisions to job reports are common. Economists said the recent outsize changes from previous months were less about individual failings and more a reflection of how the government gathers its data. Early versions of the jobs report rely on larger firms that respond quickly, while responses from smaller businesses — often more affected by economic headwinds — filter in later.
As their data is added, job totals have been steadily revised downward, painting a grimmer picture of the labor market than earlier reports suggested. In June, much of the revision was linked to state and local education jobs, whose numbers dropped dramatically after updated data came in.
“A big revision in one jobs report is not a sign of the declining accuracy of federal statistics, especially when there is so much uncertainty and good reasons job numbers are likely to be revised,” said Jed Kolko, a senior fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
These extraordinary revisions and the sudden removal of a BLS chief could inject more uncertainty into an already volatile labor landscape. The episode underscores questions about the state of the U.S. job market and also about the independence and stability of the federal agencies tasked with reporting the nation’s most critical economic data.
Staffing shortages at the bureau are already fueling questions about the agency’s ability to accurately tabulate data on consumer prices.
“The president is risking material economic harm through his politicization of the BLS and of official government data,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who worked with McEntarfer in the early 2010s at the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It is imperative that businesses, households and investors believe that official government data are accurate and do not reflect any political bias,” Strain said. “Fortunately, that is true of the data, but by sowing doubt, President Trump is undermining the integrity of the information that businesses, investors and households rely on.”
Beach, who served as McEntarfer’s predecessor during Trump’s first term and into the Biden administration, called the firing “totally groundless.” He warned it set a dangerous precedent and risked undermining the agency’s statistical mission.
Earlier Friday, the bureau said an educational issue may have been the biggest driver of the most recent revisions. For June alone, the department downwardly revised nonfarm payrolls by 133,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis, “largely the result of routine incorporation of additional/corrected sample that came in after the initial release,” a department spokeswoman said in a written statement. The revision, she added, was concentrated within state and local government education, contributing to about 40 percent of the total downward shift.
June’s report initially showed a gain of 63,500 jobs in that sector, but updated figures released Friday slashed that number to just 7,500 — a sign the earlier spike may have reflected seasonal quirks tied to the school calendar.
The department spokeswoman said monthly revisions typically have offsetting movements among major industries, meaning some industries see figures revised up while others see downward revisions. But in June, most of the industry revisions were negative, she added.
Lawmakers expressed alarm over the decision.
Asked whether she could trust the federal government’s jobs statistics after McEntarfer’s firing, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a Trump foil, exclaimed, “No! That’s the problem!”
“And when you fire people, it makes people trust them even less,” she added.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called McEntarfer’s dismissal “very dangerous” and “another step in Trump’s moving this country toward authoritarianism.”
“I think what Trump is doing is destroying the credibility of the United States government in terms of informing the American people about the realities of what is going on in our society,” Sanders said. “If you fire the people, the objective people who try to come up with the best information possible, and replace them with political hacks who will tell the president what he wants to hear, then nobody will trust that information, and, in the long run, it makes it harder for us to go forward because we don’t really know what’s going on.”
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