When President Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, most people considered it an instance of Trump’s petulance. This is how Trump himself explained it:
In 2024, it was believed by many people–including me–that the BLS was trying to help first Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris, by releasing good jobs numbers, which would get a lot of publicity, and then quietly revising them downward when the next month’s numbers–again positive, but wrong–came out. If that was deliberate, it was a reprehensible practice.
But what is happening now is the same thing, only more so: an excellent jobs report, followed by a downgrade. Stephen Moore puts it in graph form that is easy to understand:
If BLS was trying to help President Biden, it is really trying to help President Trump. I think the more likely explanation is incompetence. We have never seen anything like the massive mis-estimates of recent months. Either the BLS has gotten terrible at its job, or it should delay its jobs estimates until they can be made more reliably. So, while Trump’s rationale for firing Dr. McEntarfer was flawed, it is no stretch to say that BLS needs new leadership.
