President Trump’s advisers are defending his decision to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after Friday’s jobs report showed the economy gaining just 73,000 jobs in July.
In a social media post on Friday, Trump baselessly claimed the numbers “were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
On Sunday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Trump “wants his own people there so that when we the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.”
William Beach, who served as Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner during President Trump’s first term, told Here & Now the president’s decision to fire McEntarfer has damaged the agency’s credibility.
“I think damage has been done, even if it’s the best possible person,” Beach said, referring to the next person who runs the agency. “There will be a time in the next, you know, year or two or so when the number comes in really low and we’ll all say, ‘well, you know, it was probably lower, but the commissioner had an influence on those numbers.’ Now I won’t say that because I know the staff, the loyal Americans who work there, and people who have deep knowledge about the system won’t say that, but most Americans trust the president and they say, ‘Well, the president says it’s cooked, it’s cooked.’”
4 questions with William Beach
What’s your reaction to the Trump administration saying Trump wants his “own people” as the BLS commissioner to ensure reliable numbers’?
“First off, it’s perfectly OK for President Trump to want his own person in that position. Remember, there’s only one presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed position at BLS, and that is the commissioner, and that’s perfectly OK.
“The other part of it, so that the numbers could be accurate, says that there is a huge role to play by the commissioner in the formation of those numbers, and that’s the part that is not correct.
“The commissioner has a leadership role for sure, you know, CEO and so forth, but the processes of creating the numbers, particularly the employment numbers and the inflation numbers, are really kept really distant from the commissioner. Remember the commissioner is the only person who represents the administration in the bureau. And so the numbers are collected without the commissioner’s involvement in any way. They’re processed by BLS at the regional and at the national level. They’re prepared for the data systems. They’re even prepared for the publications itself before the commissioner even sees them.”
Is it possible to rig the numbers?
“It’s not possible and it’s not possible by design. When I was commissioner, two years under Trump, two years under Biden, I was locked out of the process, as every commissioner prior to me was, of the preparation of these numbers, and the reason is quite clear: If I wasn’t locked out, if there was even the hint that the commissioner could get in there and say, ‘Well, you know, this number needs to be rounded up or rounded down’ or something, that would mean political interference and the numbers would have less credibility in financial markets and in policymaking markets.”
Are big revisions ordinary?
“It’s not out of the ordinary if the economy is turning down or turning up. It’s during the turning points, and you only know this in retrospect, that you see these large revisions up or larger visions down. Here, what we have is more information. The jobs report is kept open for two months. This is a sample. We get the sample for the first month, make the estimate, get more sample, get more sample, and, getting more sample, we saw that state and local education in particular underperformed what the first estimate was. And I think that was because they were running out of COVID-era money. More information comes in, the sample gets better, the estimates get tighter, you know, by the third sample, we’ve got about 93% of all the thousands and thousands of surveys in, and that means that we’ve got a pretty good number.
“So what he’s really criticizing is the effort to make the number more accurate, and that’s what was happening last week.”
What are the consequences of not trusting statistics?
“I think the first thing you have to think about is, if I’m an owner of a business looking at regional data from BLS or if I’m looking to invest in the United States or buy stocks and bonds but have a little bit of a risk margin, future returns. I’m going to be wondering whether or not to do that. It creates uncertainty, in other words, financial markets just totally rely on these, on these data and, and that’s my main concern is that the economy won’t perform as well.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
____
Hafsa Quraishi produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Scotto also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR