President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Aug. 1, just hours after the bureau’s monthly employment summary reported slightly worse jobs numbers than expected. BLS reported that the U.S. economy added 73,000 jobs in July, keeping the unemployment rate steady at 4.2%. It also revised its May and June jobs numbers downward by 258,000.
In a post that day on his privately owned social media platform Truth Social, Trump claimed without offering any evidence that BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer — a “Biden appointee” — “faked the jobs numbers before the election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of victory.”
To help keep its work free from political influence, the BLS is housed within the Department of Labor but functions independently, without direction from the secretary of labor. Its staff — primarily economists and other researchers who are career civil servants — carry out and interpret in-depth surveys on the U.S. labor force and economy. They apply the same methodology regardless of who happens to be in office.
BLS is relied on to produce monthly reports on employment, inflation, and wages as well as quarterly and annual reports on union membership levels and earnings, how Americans spend their time, and many other topics.
The agency’s monthly reports on jobs are treated by financial markets as a sign of how healthy the economy is. The reports are based on large-scale surveys of employers who are asked to report how many employees they have at a given moment in time. To be as timely as possible, the agency publishes its numbers for the previous month immediately at the beginning of each new month, and later revises them as late survey returns come in.
Trump suggested that those routine revisions were “manipulated for political purposes.”
In a post on x.com a few minutes later, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said she supported the president’s decision to replace the “Biden-appointed” commissioner.
Though appointed by President Biden, McEntarfer was confirmed with a bipartisan vote of 86 Senators, including then-Senator J.D. Vance. She was supposed to serve a four-year term that runs through December 2027.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump said in a second post later that day. “The Economy is BOOMING,” he declared.
William Beach, Trump’s own appointee who headed BLS from 2019 to 2023, told reporters it’s not possible for the commissioner to have influence over labor data. As many as 40 career economists produce the report based on raw data, and they would blow the whistle if a BLS commissioner changed their findings. Beach also criticized the president’s statements, saying they could undermine confidence in key data about the U.S. economy.
