The former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that she had been given no sense by Trump administration officials that they were upset with her performance before she was fired by the president after presenting a weak jobs report last month.
In her most extensive public comments since being ousted by President Donald Trump on Aug. 1, Erika McEntarfer said her meetings with economic advisers at the White House and top officials at the Labor Department before the release of that month’s jobs report went about as she expected, given that it showed tepid job growth for July and sizable downward revisions for May and June.
“The faces around the room were pretty glum,” she said at an event hosted by Bard College, her undergraduate alma mater. “Let’s face it, this isn’t the kind of news that any administration really wants to hear.”
McEntarfer said that administration officials she spoke with were primarily focused on routine questions, such as recent historical examples of similar trends and whether the issue was concentrated among smaller employers or more broadly based.
“These are really normal questions that economists ask when they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with the data,” she said. “It didn’t signal anything unusual.”
Nothing seemed awry, McEntarfer said, until she saw an email from a reporter asking her about a social media post from Trump, in which he called the jobs numbers “RIGGED” and called for her removal. Her termination notice from the White House was already sitting in her inbox by then, she said.
“Firing your chief statisticians for releasing data you do not like, it has serious economic consequences,” she told the audience, citing Argentina, Greece and Turkey as countries that have faced negative ramifications for intruding on independent economic indicators. “The resulting loss of trust in economic statistics led these countries to worsening economic crises, higher inflation and higher borrowing costs. If we follow a similar path, all Americans will suffer the consequences.”
In the weeks since McEntarfer’s firing, BLS has been led by William Wiatrowski, a career official who previously helmed the agency in an acting capacity during Trump’s first term. She praised him as “one of the finest public servants I have ever worked with” and said he is “widely esteemed” within the agency.
She made no mention of Heritage Foundation Chief Economist E.J. Antoni, Trump’s nominee to take charge of BLS. His selection has been greeted with skepticism by Democrats and economists, who express doubt that he will safeguard the agency and its data from political interference.
“I’m afraid we have to fear for the independence of the agencies themselves,” McEntarfer said. “Economic data must be free from partisan influence; it is essential to the mission of the agency.”
The Trump administration has tried to downplay the president’s repeated assertions that the data is being intentionally manipulated to damage him and other Republicans, instead saying that McEntarfer was failing to provide data that was sufficiently accurate at the time of release and blaming her for other errors committed by the agency during her tenure.
“For years, the BLS has been failing America’s businesses, policymakers, and families by publishing jobs reports with vastly inaccurate data,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement Tuesday evening. “The prior leadership at the BLS did not take any action to increase response rates or modernize data collection methods to improve the agency’s accuracy. These problems have existed for years, and President Trump is actually taking steps to fix them.”
McEntarfer said that BLS’ work has been hampered by the long-term impact of budget constraints and the influence of Elon Musk’s DOGE operation in the early months of Trump’s new administration.
“Economic data needs more powerful friends than it has,” she said.
McEntarfer recalled that when Trump soured on Musk over the summer and the billionaire left the government, she told another senior official that she believed that BLS would then be able to “return to some sense of normalcy.”
“Two weeks later, I was fired,” McEntarfer said.
