By Sanjay Paul
On Aug 1, 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published updated employment data for the US economy.
The data came out at 8:30 a.m.
By the end of the day, the BLS Commissioner was fired.
What happened?
In the first three months since President Trump took office, job growth had been respectable: 102,000 jobs were added in February, 120,000 in March, 158,000 in April.
The three-month moving average was 127,000 in April (Table 1). (Data in tables is taken from Federal Reserve Economic Data.)
But the latest employment report showed that the economy added only 73,000 jobs in July. Worse yet, revised data for the previous two months showed that job growth in May and June was much slower than originally reported: In May only 19,000 jobs were added; in June, an even scantier 14,000. All this brought down the 3-month moving average to 35,000 in July.
In January, the level of employment (number of people with jobs) was 159.1 million. By July, it had risen to 159.5 million – a tepid increase of 486,000 jobs over 6 months. That works out to an average of 81,000 jobs being added per month.
So why the firing?
On social media President Trump was quite forthcoming. He called the data revision “A TOTAL SCAM,” noting the treacherous intent behind it: “In my opinion today’s Jobs
Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” And with that, President Trump fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, vowing to replace her with “someone much more competent and qualified.” He also said. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers.”
Did the BLS put out shoddy numbers designed to cast the president in an unflattering light?
Neither President Trump nor, in a subsequent interview, Peter Navarro, one of his economic advisors, presented any evidence to support their claims of incompetence or perfidy.
This is not the first time the labor agency has come in for criticism. In 2016, then-candidate Trump declared that “the real unemployment rate is 22-23 percent,” suggesting that the BLS was putting out false numbers. An unemployment rate that high was last observed in the throes of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Four years earlier, in 2012, Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, accused the White House of skewing the unemployment numbers to strengthen Obama’s re-election bid.
The Wall Street Journal noted that the “tweet came after the Labor Department reported the country’s unemployment rate fell to 7.8% in September, the lowest since President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009.”
Economists gave scant credence to such charges. The BLS was regarded as an agency staffed by professional economists, immune to the vagaries of politics – and besides, there was no evidence to support the fanciful claims being made.
A more serious incident occurred last year.
On their website, the BLS makes it clear that the employment report will not be released before a certain time (normally, 8:30am ET) on a certain date. Such an embargo on the “transmission of material” is in place partly to prevent well-connected people from making trades — and profits — on the basis of non-public information.
But in August 2024, members of the BLS staff appeared to have released data to a select group of people in advance of the job report’s dissemination to the public. This breach threatened to engender doubts about the fairness and professionalism of the agency—and was widely condemned.
Since then, however, no further serious criticism had been levied against the agency.
The August 2025 report has shattered the complacency. The jobs numbers were significantly worse than expected, and now the commissioner was gone.
A principal reason for the lackluster overall data was the reduction in federal government employment.
Starting in February, each month has witnessed a decline in employment levels in the federal government (Table 2).
From January, when the federal government employed 3 million people, the level has fallen to 2.9 million by July – a drop of 84,000 over 6 months.
On August 11, ten days after the bombshell announcement, President Trump nominated an economist at the Heritage Foundation for the position.
Over the coming weeks and months, investors, firms, and yes, economics professors, will be watching the steady stream of economic statistics emerging from the BLS with a gimlet eye.
They will be seeking reassurance that, under the new commissioner, the data from the labor agency continues to be of the highest quality, and its work beyond reproach.
Sanjay Paul is associate professor of economics, Elizabethtown College.
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.