Story by C. Douglas Golden
So, you’ve probably heard the news: Bureau of Labor Statistics head Erika McEntarfer is out because President Donald Trump didn’t like the July jobs report.
Actually, check that: That’s not really the news as it is, that’s the news as it was reported last week when it happened. Something funny occurred on the way from event to publication, however — namely, it got lost that she was a Joe Biden holdover who already had accumulated a fair number of issues regarding the culture and practices she had cultivated at the BLS since her confirmation in 2024.
Just to give you a taste, here are two representative samples from the country’s print outlets of record for both the left and the right, starting with The New York Times, from Friday:
Hours after disappointing jobs data reflected cracks in the U.S. economy, President Trump said Friday that he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, and said without evidence on social media that she “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Mr. Trump and his top aides have made a habit of attacking government agencies, researchers and watchdogs when they have produced findings that the president personally does not like. That has led to concerns that he could seek to interfere with the operations of statistical agencies, particularly if the economy begins to take a turn for the worse.
Then, from the right (or at least center-right), The Wall Street Journal:
President Trump fired the top Bureau of Labor Statistics official after the government published new data showing that U.S. hiring slowed sharply this summer…
William Beach, whom Trump appointed to lead the BLS during his first term, praised McEntarfer’s integrity and her expertise in labor economics.
“She is a very fine analyst and a good colleague,” Beach said.
For the record, here’s the full Truth Social post, which explains Trump’s position neatly: namely, that McEntarfer is a Biden appointee with a history of, to his ears, curious jobs numbers at felicitous times:
As noted by The New York Times on Friday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said that the BLS had been “revising numbers all over the place in a way that makes it so that I don’t think anybody really can trust that the numbers are right, whichever way they’re going.”
“I think it is a good time for a fresh set of eyes to look at what the heck is going on,” he added, because it’s “so important that people trust” the data BLS is putting out.
At some level, however, this was not what was being pushed. Instead, because there were bad jobs numbers, off with McEntarfer’s professional head.
So, beyond the fact that she’s Joe Biden’s pick and that the new president has announced his intention to sweep house, let’s go into why canning McEntarfer wasn’t just a matter of loyalty, but one of trust.
Before being nominated by Biden and confirmed by the Senate — by a relatively healthy 86-8 margin, according to Bloomberg Law, it should be noted — McEntarfer has a long history in the economic wing of the D.C. swamp, specifically at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, where she had been since 2010.
Perhaps July’s jobs report is what drew President Trump’s attention in her general direction, but if you’re going to Washington with a mandate to drain the swamp generally and the prior administration’s swamp specifically, she should have been updating that CV on Jan. 21.
Her tenure, short that it might be, also saw controversies over the quality of data the BLS was producing.
Last June, six months after she took the position, McEntarfer announced that BLS would be reducing the sample size of its household survey in the monthly jobs report by 7.6 percent in 2025, citing budget constraints and telling a conference there was a “real risk” in a decline in data quality.
“Survey costs are increasing faster than the budget. In the past we have managed, but now sample cuts are needed,” she said.
Then in December, the Department of Labor found in a review that the BLS was “not sufficiently focused” on how key economic data are released and that the culture of the agency required retooling.
From Bloomberg:
The report was commissioned after several incidents around data releases raised questions about how some of the world’s most sensitive economic information gets disseminated. In August, the BLS provided at least three Wall Street firms with highly anticipated figures on revisions to US payrolls — all while the official release was delayed on its website…
The episode not only sparked outrage among investors but also on Capitol Hill, where key Senate Republicans charged the BLS with its “continued failures” in producing crucial economic data and demanded answers to questions around its data release protocols.
Other incidents earlier in the year raised similar concerns. In May, the BLS inadvertently published inflation data a half hour before the scheduled release time, and separately a BLS economist disclosed internal data to an exclusive group of analysts he described as “super users.”
Does this directly tie McEntarfer or the BLS as currently constituted to cooking and then revising jobs numbers for political reasons? No, but it doesn’t paint the most optimistic picture of the inner workings of the BLS, either.
The two most important words in this whole to-do are this: “Biden holdover.” If this were a Trump holdover and Joe Biden got cantankerous about jobs numbers between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. — the hours which White House staff told reporters he was “dependably engaged,” in case you’ve forgotten — that person would be gone fasters than a lying dog-faced pony soldier and/or Corn Pop and his “bad boys.”
That person would have been gone faster if it came up during the hours where he wasn’t “dependably engaged” — but that’s probably because White House staff could have convinced Biden he was a holdover from the Wendell Willkie administration, and who would want a BLS head appointed by that hard-drinking plutocrat? (Who was never president due to losing the 1940 election to FDR — but like Biden ever reliably knew he himself was president, either.)
Democrats obliterate GOP staffers when they sweep into Washington, no matter how nonpartisan they’re supposed to be. The few holdovers are the McEntarfer types that the Republicans stupidly leave around or let in the door in the first place. (See: Milley, Mark; Wray, Christopher; Kelly, John; et al.)
Remember the Golden Rule of politics: Do unto others as they do unto others as they do unto you. The Democrats destroyed whatever vestige of bipartisanship existed when they swept into office in 2021. They called the opposition traitors unless they kowtowed. They continue to paint them as existential threats to democracy. And we’re supposed to buy that their picks should be allowed to stay around just because? Politics, like nuclear warfare, is a game of mutually assured destruction: Once you cross a Rubicon, it stays crossed.