The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from President Donald Trump’s first term is panning his Friday firing of Erika McEntarfer, who oversaw a July jobs report that rankled the president and suggested a slowdown in the economy.
Bill Beach, who Trump tapped for the top job at BLS in 2017, said Sunday that the president’s suggestions that McEntarfer had rigged the jobs report betrayed a misunderstanding in the data collection and reporting standards at the bureau, which compiles statistics on critical economic factors including inflation and employment.
“There’s no way for that to happen,” Beach told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union.” “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers for until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.”
Trump fired McEntarfer after BLS’ monthly jobs report for July showed that the economy had added just 73,000 jobs, coming in under expectations. He also took issue with the agency’s major revisions to job numbers from May and June. Employment only increased by 33,000 jobs in those two months, the government said Friday, down by 258,000 from previous estimates. Revisions to preceding job reports are routinely issued when a new one comes out.
The president also suggested McEntarfer had led an effort to inflate job statistics to aid former Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election.
McEntarfer, Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social, would “be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”
But Beach told Hunt on Sunday that the bureau’s estimates are far better now than in previous decades. And the president’s firing of McEntarfer “undermines credibility” in the statistical system, he said.
“Suppose that they get a new commissioner and this person, male or female are just the best people possible. And they do a bad number. Well, everybody’s going to think, well, it’s not as bad as it probably really is because they’re going to suspect political influence.”
Larry Summers, who led the Treasury Department under former President Bill Clinton, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that the firing “is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism.”
“I mean, this is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did, Summers said on “This Week.” “I’m surprised that other officials have not responded by resigning themselves as took place when Richard Nixon fired people lawlessly.”
