Senior Republican lawmakers are condemning the decision of their party leader, Donald Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.
The disappointing figures – coupled with a downward revision of the two previous months amounting to 258,000 fewer jobs and data showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year – point to an overall economic deterioration in the US.
Trump defended his decision to fire US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Without evidence to back his claims, the president wrote on social media that were numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.
But the firing of McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.
“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”
Lummis added that if the numbers are unreliable, the public should be told – but firing McEntarfer was “kind of impetuous”.
North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, said: “If she was just fired because the president or whoever decided to fire the director just … because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”
Kentucky senator Rand Paul, another Republican, questioned whether McEntarfer’s firing was an effective way of improving the numbers.
“We have to look somewhere for objective statistics,” he said. “When the people providing the statistics are fired, it makes it much harder to make judgments that you know, the statistics won’t be politicized.”
According to NBC News, Paul said his “first impression” was that “you can’t really make the numbers different or better by firing the people doing the counting”.
Tillis and Paul were both opponents of Trump’s recent economic legislative package, which the president dubbed the “big, beautiful bill”.
But Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who supported the legislation after winning substantial economic support for her state, remarked that the jobs numbers could not be trusted – and “that’s the problem”.
“And when you fire people, then it makes people trust them even less,” she said.
William Beach, a former BLS commissioner appointed by Trump in his first presidency, posted on X that McEntarfer’s firing was “totally groundless”. He added that the dismissal set a dangerous precedent and undermined the BLS’s statistical mission.
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Beach also co-signed a letter by “the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics” that went further, accusing Trump of seeking to blame someone for bad news and calling the rationale for McEntarfer’s firing “without merit”.
The letter asserted that the dismissal “undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families and policymakers”.
The letter pointed out that the jobs tabulation process “is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference”, adding that US official statistics “are the gold standard globally”.
“When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science,” the letter said.
Democrats have also hit out at Trump’s decision. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders described it as “the sign of an authoritarian type”, and he said the decision would make it harder for the American people “to believe the information that comes out of the government”.
Paul Schroeder, executive director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, described the president’s allegation against McEntarfer as “very damaging and outrageous”.
He said: “Not only does it undermine the integrity of federal economic statistics, but it also politicizes data which need to remain independent and trustworthy. This action is a grave error by the administration and one that will have ramifications for years to come.”
