Trump Redoubles Attack on Federal Jobs Data, Calls Numbers Political

The Washington Post

16:48 JST, August 6, 2025

President Donald Trump doubled down on his decision to dismiss the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, casting the agency that published a bleak jobs report last week as broken and corrupt.

“It’s a highly political situation,” Trump said Tuesday morning on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “It’s totally rigged.” Trump offered no evidence for his assertion, which his former BLS commissioner has said is not true.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the top official overseeing employment statistics, saying that ousting her calls into question the independence and stability of the federal agency that reports some of the nation’s most critical economic data.

Defending his action in the CNBC interview, Trump complained about the timing of previous jobs reports released by the bureau, but he got the timeline wrong. He said downward revisions of the number of new jobs in the economy happened only after he was elected president. Early last August, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency reported rising unemployment and a cooling jobs market. Later that month the bureau reported that the economy had created 818,000 fewer jobs than it had previously reported from April 2023 through March 2024, marking the largest annual revision to federal jobs data in 15 years.

“STOCK MARKETS ARE CRASHING, JOBS NUMBERS ARE TERRIBLE, WE ARE HEADING TO WORLD WAR III, AND WE HAVE TWO OF THE MOST INCOMPETENT ‘LEADERS’ IN HISTORY,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Aug. 5, 2024, as he campaigned to replace Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “THIS IS NOT GOOD!!!”

That downward revision was eclipsed by what the bureau reported Friday: Hiring in May and June dropped by a quarter-million jobs, a bigger decrease than previously reported. It is the steepest two-month downward revision on record outside the pandemic. Economists have attributed the slowdown in hiring in part to uncertainty fueled by Trump administration policies, including an erratic approach to trade and tougher immigration enforcement, as well as elevated interest rates and federal spending cuts.

A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s thinking, said that the president’s objections to the BLS have “always been on his mind” and that the most recent revisions of the data were “the final step” that brought him to the decision to fire McEntarfer.

The revision to the May and June jobs numbers were in line with common practice at the agency. Early versions of the bureau’s jobs reports rely on larger businesses that respond quickly; the updated version factors in responses from smaller businesses that are often more affected by changes to the economic landscape.

The commissioner does not produce the jobs numbers nor view them until they are finalized in a report written by career staff, several former commissioners told The Washington Post. The report also found the unemployment rate in July increased slightly to 4.2 percent, a relatively low level.

Trump sidestepped a question about whether his firing of McEntarfer would undermine confidence in the accuracy of the government’s number-crunching system if a future BLS report shows improvements. He instead pivoted back to his victory in the 2024 presidential race and maintained that this month’s weak unemployment report was driven by political interests.

“When they say that nobody was involved, that it wasn’t political, give me a break,” Trump said.

Mark Mazur, who served in senior Treasury Department roles during the Obama and Biden administrations, said that if government statistics become distorted, private sector accounting of economic trends could serve as an accountability check on government data.

“You’re going to get a situation here where you get such a disconnect between stuff that you see that you kind of believe on the private sector side, and what the government is saying,” he said.

Mazur also warned that foreign investors could flee the United States if they feel they do not have a firm understanding of the nation’s economic condition and how it compares with its past. Investors could conclude, “Well, I don’t rely as much on that information, and I try to hedge myself against it,” he said.

Ron Hetrick, a former BLS economist who oversaw the monthly employment statistics program, said he hopes McEntarfer’s ousting will put pressure on the next commissioner to provide transparency about the process behind the reports.

“If the data comes in and continues to paint a story that isn’t popular, at least if someone is explaining it, then maybe it puts people at ease,” said Hetrick, now a principal economist at Lightcast, which provides labor market analytics. “That will make them more successful in light of what we’ve seen.”