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The jobs numbers were bad — so Trump fired the messenger
The abrupt dismissal of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, briefly explained.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration got some ugly jobs numbers today — so the president fired the official in charge of those numbers, posing the ominous possibility that such numbers will be altered to Trump’s liking in the future.
What happened? On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which is part of the Labor Department, released its latest employment numbers, and the news wasn’t good for the US economy.
The US added 73,000 jobs in July, which was well below the 100,000 jobs economists had expected. But, even worse, the previously released jobs reports from May and June were revised dramatically downward. It turns out that, in those two months combined, the US added 258,000 fewer jobs than the BLS had initially thought.
How did Trump react? Subsequent revisions to initial calculations are a normal and longstanding part of the messy process of collecting real-world economic data. But Trump has long insisted they are part of a politicized plot against him.
When BLS released similar downward revisions in August 2024, Trump complained that the Biden administration was “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America.”
Now, in a Truth Social post this afternoon, Trump announced he would fire BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Trump deemed McEntarfer an untrustworthy “Biden appointee” (she was a career civil servant). He asserted that she “faked” the 2024 jobs numbers to help Biden and “RIGGED” the new job numbers to hurt Republicans.
Will Trump cook jobs numbers in the future? This would seem to create an incentive for the next BLS commissioner to either “adjust” the jobs numbers to Trump’s liking — or be fired.
Politicization of economic data is something that typically happens in authoritarian regimes or economic basket cases, and it would be a grim trend if it started happening here.
That may be difficult to pull off in practice, though. “I don’t think Trump will be able to fake the data given the procedures,” Harvard economist Jason Furman wrote on X, though he acknowledged “there is now a risk.”
Furthermore, there are many other economic statistics collected by the federal government, states, and businesses — so any effort to cover up the state of the US economy will be doomed to fail. (Which is why Trump’s initial conspiracy theories about the BLS under Biden made no sense.)
What’s the bigger picture? Trump is continuing in his push to politicize every inch of the federal government — in keeping with the right-wing insistence that nonpartisan, technocratic experts can’t be trusted because they’re all liberals. Experts aren’t perfect — but if they get purged from the government, we’ll miss them when they’re gone.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Tired of reading about corruption in the American government? Check out this report by the Wall Street Journal’s Hannah Miao about the “criminal enterprise of monkeys” robbing tourists blind in Bali. The monkeys have figured out that some human items, like phones, are more valuable and can be accordingly bartered back for more food. That is, they understand leverage and are skilled at the shakedown. Sound familiar?
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