How Trump decided to fire a little-known statistician, sparking conspiracy theories about government data

CNN

7 hours ago

President Donald Trump was fuming about the July jobs report signaling a significant slowdown in the economy when he recalled one of his simmering resentments: the statistician overseeing the tabulation of the monthly figures was appointed by former President Joe Biden.
Unlike Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom Trump has been criticizing for months, the president has the authority to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So last Friday, he did — an unprecedented decision that sparked the latest White House controversy and cascading fallout over injecting politics into government economic data.
'I was thinking about it this morning, before the numbers that came out,' Trump told reporters Friday. 'I said, 'Who is the person that does these numbers?''
That person, whom Trump suddenly made a household name after publicly firing her, is Erika McEntarfer.
While some of the president's economic advisers sought to offer up explanations about a disappointing July jobs report – and downward revisions in May and June figures that indicated a hiring slowdown – it was an argument from Sergio Gor, the head of presidential personnel and Trump's chief loyalty enforcer, that aides said resonated more with the president: She's a Biden appointee.
Sources familiar with his decision to oust McEntarfer said the president had brought her up previously, criticizing the fact that the person sitting atop of the agency compiling such crucial economic data had been appointed by his predecessor.
That alone had irked Trump, they said. But until Friday, he didn't believe he had a reason to dismiss her.
That changed after Friday's report, when Trump informed some of his top advisers he wanted to fire McEntarfer. Two White House officials said that, to their knowledge, no one took issue with that decision.
'I fired her,' Trump told reporters. 'And you know what? I did the right thing.'
With that, a fresh conspiracy theory was born at the White House, as the president said without evidence that McEntarfer had 'rigged' the monthly jobs report.
McEntarfer, who has not responded to comment, has spent decades as a government statistician, working at the Census Bureau and across the bureaucracy, surveying and studying labor and economic figures. But in a January speech to the Atlanta Economic Club, she talked about the importance of producing timely economic data.
'I've been interested in economic measurement for a very long time,' McEntarfer said. 'But like everyone who lived through the last five years, I've developed a deeper appreciation for the importance of timely economic data.'
Her canning was the latest example of Trump moving to discredit facts inconvenient to his political narrative, or to dismiss those responsible for compiling them. Mostly lost in the controversy was discussion of the actual state of the US labor market, which is now flashing warning signs amid uncertainty over Trump's tariffs.
Trump's decision to dismiss McEntarfer drew immediate condemnation from economists of all stripes, who used descriptions like 'damaging,' 'authoritarian' and 'banana republic' to assess the move.
'I don't know that there's any grounds at all for this firing,' said William Beach, whom Trump selected during his first term to head up the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 'And it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS.'
Officials said the aspect of the report that most angered Trump was the major revisions down from previous months, which he has claimed publicly, without evidence, were politically motivated.
'That's what set him off,' one White House official told CNN, adding: 'He saw the revisions and knew something was awry for it to be changed so drastically. And this isn't a first-time thing. Considering so many companies make decisions based off these numbers it's an issue that needed to be fixed.'
Far from being a sign of political scam, however, the revisions are a standard part of the monthly jobs report. Low survey responses can make the report more challenging to estimate, so BLS continues to collect the payroll data as it's reported and it revises the data accordingly.
Earlier this year, Trump had a similar conversation with his closest officials regarding whether he could fire Powell. Those advisers warned him against doing so, telling him such a move was not only legally questionable but had broader implications for the economy given Powell's role as being independent from the executive branch.
But many of those same officials argued to Trump that removing McEntarfer, who serves as the pleasure of the president, was a move Trump was justified to make, despite BLS being considered an impartial agency.
White House officials, dispatched on television to defend the action, offered varying explanations, none of which clearly offered proof of Trump's claim the jobs numbers were 'rigged' or 'concocted' to make him look bad.
Trump declared Sunday it would only be a matter of days before he nominates a new commissioner to lead the agency, which he referred to as the 'statistician.' Left unsaid was how, precisely, Trump's hand-selected appointee would remedy the various problems the president's team sees in how the bureau collects and compiles jobs numbers.
Traditionally, leaders of the agency have been economists selected from other government positions, think tanks or universities. None have been household names, either before their appointment or during their tenure.
Officials said Trump was seeking a 'highly qualified' individual to take over and 'modernize' the bureau's methods, but whoever emerges as Trump's selection will undoubtedly face scrutiny during their confirmation process in the Senate, where even some Republicans have questioned Trump's abrupt move to dismiss the incumbent commissioner.
One of the White House officials said Trump, as of Monday, had not yet made a decision on McEntarfer's replacement. The president's top advisers, including chief of staff Susie Wiles and the leaders of his economic team — including Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, among others — will play a major role in deciding the next commissioner, the official said.
Beach, appearing on CNN's 'State of the Union,' said whomever replaces McEntarfer would struggle to gain credibility, even though Trump's stated goal was to restore faith in the numbers.
'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. 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,' he said. 'So this is damaging. This is not what we need to have.'
The president's decision did not appear to generate widespread internal backlash among his advisers, even as outside economists of both parties decried the move and warned it could erode confidence in critical economic numbers.
'It is my job to support the president in this issue, and I do support him. We have to ensure for the American people that we can trust this data. It's influential, it changes markets, it changes investments,' said Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in an interview on Fox Business on Monday.
Only a few hours before Trump announced he was dismissing McEntarfer on Friday, Chavez-DeRemer said the jobs report 'provides further evidence that the American people are seeing real progress.'
Other members of the president's economic team endorsed his decision. Many were quick to link issues with the jobs figures with Powell's decision to keep interest rates steady — to the persistent annoyance of Trump — suggesting policymakers at the Fed weren't receiving accurate information with which to make their decisions.
In multiple interviews since Friday, Hassett has claimed that partisanship had seeped into the jobs reports, without providing any evidence to back up the claim. He said in appearance on Fox News that 'data can't be propaganda,' though did not provide any details that could substantiate how McEntarfer or the hundreds of statisticians at the agency could have cooked the numbers.
On Monday, he suggested on CNBC that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was just another hotbed of entrenched opposition to Trump.
'All over the US government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,' he claimed.
Like most Trump administration officials, Hassett had spent the first Friday of most months this year touting the months jobs reports, saying the steady rate of hiring was indicative of a strong economy. Trump himself posted frequently when the jobs reports showed six-figure gains, never questioning the figures when they appeared to show a robust labor market.
'GREAT JOB NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!,' Trump posted in June regarding that month's report from BLS.
It was only after Friday's dismal report, that he elected to order McEntarfer's firing.
The immediate furor over the decision to fire her dwindled a bit over the weekend, even though several members of Congress expressed concern before leaving Washington for their August recess.
'If the president is firing the statistician because the numbers are unreliable, now that would be good to know,' said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican. 'But if the president is firing the statistician because he doesn't like the numbers – but they are accurate – then that's a problem.'
Economists and statisticians defended McEntarfer, saying her dismissal would create a troubling mistrust of critical economic data. In her January speech in Atlanta, she acknowledged growing challenges in compiling the monthly jobs report because the response rate to surveys from employers and employees is no longer as robust as it once was.
'Our goal at BLS is to modernize the official statistics for the 21st century,' McEntarfer said, 'and to try and get them on a sustainable path for the future.'
Six months later, she was fired.