Why Trump’s Firing of the B.L.S. Commissioner Is So Damaging

 

Aug. 1, 2025, 7:48 p.m. ETAug. 1, 2025

Jason Furman Contributing  Opinion Writer

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/01/opinion/thepoint#bls-commissioner-trump-fire-erika-mcentarfer

 

Why Trump’s Firing of the B.L.S. Commissioner Is So Damaging

On Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released disappointing jobs numbers. A few hours later, President Trump announced that he was directing the administration to fire the commissioner responsible for this highly respected, nonpartisan agency, widely considered the producer of the best labor market data in the world. This is closer to what one expects from a banana republic than from a major democratic financial center.

 

This is even more senseless than his other threats to fire officials like Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Powell makes consequential policy decisions (and as I have written, there is very good reason to insulate him from political pressure).

 

Erika McEntarfer, the fired B.L.S. commissioner, is a highly respected economist with extensive experience in the production and analysis of government data. But she does not make policy in the way that someone like Powell does. Nor does the commissioner traditionally even make the particular numbers that the B.L.S. releases. Instead those numbers are produced by the 2,000 nonpartisan career staff members who work in the agency, in this case compiling the survey responses from the more than 100,000 businesses that report their employment to the B.L.S. every month. The numbers are finalized before they get to the commissioner, a political appointee but one who often serves across administrations. The role is much more about managing and overseeing the agency and making long-term decisions.

 

Trump’s ire was directed at the large revisions to the May and June jobs numbers, which went from a previously reported respectable average of 145,500 new jobs per month to a more concerning 16,500. The revisions were unusually large — the largest since 1979, not counting the pandemic, according to economist Ernie Tedeschi.

 

But revisions are a normal part of the statistical process and, in fact, one of its strengths in balancing timeliness and accuracy of data. About one-third of the sampled businesses do not return their survey responses on time, so the initial numbers have to make imputations for the missing data. As more survey responses arrive at the B.L.S., the numbers are revised. In addition, the B.L.S. is constantly using an algorithm to do updated seasonal adjustment of its data (e.g., the normal pattern of hiring a lot of retail workers in November and December and laying them off in January); this algorithm was a major factor in the latest revision.

 

In his post, Trump accused the B.L.S. of having “manipulated for political purposes” the numbers. Not only is that claim far-fetched; it is also internally contradictory. The B.L.S. produced some large downward revisions of jobs numbers under President Joe Biden, too. The revisions were slightly different from these, because the Biden ones were part of an annual revision process using more reliable tax data. But Trump argued then that Biden helped himself by cooking the books by initially reporting high numbers, which were revised downward in August 2024.

 

Trump alluded to that claim on Friday. In the same post, he argued that the B.L.S. is also hurting him by initially reporting high numbers but then revising them downward. The same action couldn’t have helped Biden and hurt Trump.

 

And, ironically, the latest revisions strengthen Trump’s arguments for the Fed to restart its rate cuts.

 

The firing of the B.L.S. commissioner is more senseless than the threat of or actual firing of the Federal Reserve chairman, though not as consequential. But it still matters. Policymakers like the Federal Reserve Board members need reliable data — as do financial markets, including investors lending the United States trillions of dollars to finance our huge budget deficits, and businesses making decisions. Faked data in countries like Greece and Argentina helped enable bad policies and played a role in the economic crises they suffered this century.

 

The good news is that any appointee in this system, from good ones to bad ones, is just one person in a 2,000-person, highly technocratic, nonpartisan agency, who would have a hard time faking the data. The bad news is that it is not impossible to corrupt data. And either way, the confidence investors and the public have in the data could suffer a serious and senseless blow.