Former BLS chief recounts shock of getting fired over US jobs data

Dr. McEntarfer,

On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of Labor Statistics is terminated effective immediately.

Thank you for your service.

The event marks McEntarfer’s first public appearance since her dismissal. In her prepared remarks, the economist recalls the disbelief that ensued on a day that started as a typical first Friday of the month — when the government’s monthly employment report is published.

Her very public firing from the relatively obscure, technocratic role has set off concerns on Wall Street and in Washington about the independence and integrity of the nation’s gold standard economic data.

In his initial post around 2 p.m. and another later that afternoon, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the figures were manipulated for political purposes, and stressed that the numbers must be “fair and accurate.”

In reality, commissioners are barely involved in the highly computerized processes of compiling data. Past officials who held the job before McEntarfer have said they would only see the numbers once they’re finalized, not long before the president does.

‘Glum’ Faces

At the event, McEntarfer described how she didn’t detect anything unusual during her Thursday briefing on the jobs report with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. They spent some time going through the revisions, she said, explaining that they largely skewed negative.

The advisers had two questions, McEntarfer said: When was the last time this happened and was it disproportionate among small businesses? In response to the first question, she said early in the pandemic, and to the second question, she said no, it was broad based. She said those were normal questions economists ask.

McEntarfer then spoke to the head of the Labor Department, which oversees the BLS, at 8 a.m. that Friday morning, half an hour before the release.

“I explained to the Secretary that the negative skew in job growth among the late reporting firms was an unusual event, but not an unprecedented one,” she said in her remarks. While that can indicate the start of a recession, she said she explained that wasn’t necessarily the case this time around as other labor data were holding up.

“The faces around the table were glum. Let’s face it, this isn’t the kind of news that any administration wants to hear,” she continued. “I asked if anyone had any questions on the revisions before we moved on to the July numbers. There were none, so we moved on.”

Shortly after the report came out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said on Bloomberg Television that while the revisions were “unexpected,” they were mostly concentrated in education and the seasonal workforce. She largely focused on positive aspects of the economy, including all the jobs added since Trump took office and that he delivered on trade deals, which was similar to her official statement on the jobs data.

By that afternoon, she raised her concerns about the revisions in a post on X supporting Trump’s decision to dismiss McEntarfer: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

Trump has since picked EJ Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to step into the role. His choice drew criticism from professional peers of both political ideologies for his vocal MAGA views and lack of experience. Antoni is awaiting a Senate confirmation hearing, and it’s unclear whether he will secure the necessary support given “extreme reservations” from a key Republican senator.

“For years the BLS has been failing America’s businesses, policymakers, and families by publishing jobs reports with vastly inaccurate data,” Taylor Rogers, a spokeswoman for the White House, said in an emailed statement.

“The prior leadership at the BLS did not take any action to increase response rates or modernize data collection methods to improve the agency’s accuracy. These problems have existed for years and President Trump is actually taking steps to fix them,” Rogers said.

More Revisions

Since McEntarfer’s dismissal, the BLS has revised jobs data further and drawn additional criticism from the White House, which called the preliminary benchmark revisions released Sept. 9 “another blunder in the lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence at BLS.”

Economists and statisticians say that monthly payrolls revisions are routine, because the BLS continues to collect additional information from businesses that take longer to respond to the survey. Revisions ultimately make the data more accurate.

The agency has long struggled with tight budgets and staffing constraints — both of which predate Trump, but have grown more acute in his second term. The agency is increasingly relying on a statistical guessing method in a key inflation gauge to compensate for lost staff, though was recently allowed to post jobs for some workers to collect price data.

Those data collection issues, as well as the employment revisions, prompted a review of the agency’s “challenges” last week by the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General.

McEntarfer was nominated by President Joe Biden in 2023 and approved with bipartisan Senate support the following year. She arrived at the agency with over 20 years of experience in the federal government, including roles at the Census Bureau and Treasury Department. She previously served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Biden.

She called her firing a “dangerous step” that has “serious economic consequences.”

“That’s an attack on the independence of an institution arguably as important as the Federal Reserve for economic stability,” she said.