- President Trump fired the BLS commissioner after a disappointing July jobs report.
- The BLS is an independent agency that operates under the Labor Department.
- BLS jobs data comes from surveys of U.S. households and employers.
President Donald Trump continued to lambast the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Sunday, just days after firing the head of the federal data gathering agency over a jobs report the president called “rigged.”
After firing Erika McEntarfer, who had served as the BLS commissioner since January 2024, Trump took to Truth Social over the weekend, claiming without evidence that McEntarfer had manipulated data ahead of the 2024 election.
“Head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics did the same thing just before the Presidential Election, when she lifted the numbers for jobs to an all time high,” Trump posted Sunday. “I then won the Election, anyway, and she readjusted the numbers downward, calling it a mistake, of almost one million jobs. A SCAM! She did it again, with another massive “correction,” and got FIRED! She had the biggest miscalculations in over 50 years."
The Friday Employment Situation Summary report from the BLS found U.S. employers added 73,000 new jobs in July, a figure that fell well short of pre-report projections. As is typical in the federal monthly jobs summary, the agency also made adjustments from its previous two months of employment data.
May’s jobs total was revised from an initial report of 144,000 to 19,000 jobs for the month, a revision of 125,000 positions. For the June jobs total, the BLS on Friday said the U.S. economy added 14,000 jobs that month, down from a preliminary estimate of 147,000 and a change of 133,000 positions.
Following the report’s release last week, Trump posted on social media that the new jobs data had been manipulated based on partisan leanings.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last Friday.
How the BLS gathers jobs data
The Bureau of Labor Statistics was established over 140 years ago and functions as an independent agency under the umbrella of the U.S. Labor Department. Its commissioner is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The BLS is charged with collecting a wide variety of economic data including employment counts, inflation, worker wages and other information. The agency uses two different surveys to assemble monthly reports on the U.S. jobs sector.
The Household Survey is conducted by the Census Bureau and gathers information directly from approximately 60,000 households about employment and labor force participation. Information gathered in the survey forms a representative sample of the U.S. labor force.
The Establishment Survey, conducted by the BLS, surveys around 120,000 non-agricultural businesses to collect data on payroll numbers, employee earnings and hours worked. The sample size for the survey represents about one-third of all non-farm jobs.
While the adjustments made to the jobs figures for May and June together represent an adjustment of some 250,000 jobs, it is not unusual for sizable revisions to be assessed on the jobs data.
A report from CNN notes much larger revisions have been made in the recent past including in 2020 and 2021 when jobs numbers were all over the map due to the pandemic. Revisions in four months during those years were bigger than the revisions from last month’s report — including the largest-ever 679,000-job revision in March 2020, attributed to particularly poor survey responses during a nationwide lockdown.
There have been bigger revisions outside of the pandemic, too, including a revision of 143,000 jobs in January 2009.
What the firing could mean for future data reports
Economists and others warned that Trump’s decision to fire McEntarfer could undermine trust in the government’s widely used economic data reports.
Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, whom Trump appointed, said the commissioner’s firing was “totally groundless,” which “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau,” according to a post on X shortly after the firing, per a report from CNBC.
In a Sunday interview with CNN, Beach said politicizing BLS leadership could cast a cloud over subsequent reporting from the agency.
“Suppose that they get a new commissioner, and this person, male or female, are just the best people possible, right? And they do a bad number,” Beach told CNN.
“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.”
Some suggested there could be alternative methods for gathering data on the U.S. employment sector.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said that the government uses surveys to inform the jobs data that “frankly just aren’t that effective anymore”, per CNBC.
“They can get this data, I think, other ways, and I think that’s where the focus ought to be,” he said Sunday on CBS News. “How do we get the data and be more resilient and more predictable and more understandable?”