Top White House officials on Aug. 3 said that it was necessary to fire Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) head Erika McEntarfer following the release of a weaker-than-expected jobs report late last week.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CBS News in an interview broadcast on Aug. 3 that the president had “real concerns” about the BLS data, while National Economic Council head Kevin Hassett told Fox News that President Donald Trump was “right to call for new leadership” at the bureau.
Hassett said that Trump’s concern with the data released on Aug. 1 related to downsizings made to the May and June data, indicating that 258,000 fewer jobs had been created in those two months.
“What we need is a fresh set of eyes over the BLS,” Hassett also told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Aug. 3.
After the report was issued, Trump announced on Aug. 1 that he was firing McEntarfer. She had been nominated to her position by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in an 86–8 vote.
In a subsequent post on social media platform Bluesky, McEntarfer wrote, “It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy.”
In the report on Aug. 1, the BLS did not provide a reason for why it revised the data but noted that “monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.”
In a statement on Truth Social, Trump alleged that McEntarfer had “faked the jobs numbers” ahead of the 2024 election to boost his then-rival, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
“No one can be that wrong” the president said. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
In another Truth Social post, Trump stated that he believes that the Aug. 1 report on jobs was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
During his Aug. 3 interview, Hassett echoed the president’s concerns regarding the accuracy of the report, noting that revisions were made after Biden ended his presidential campaign in 2024, which led to Harris entering the race.
“There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder. And I think the most important thing for people to know is that it’s the president’s highest priority that the data be trusted and that people get to the bottom of why these revisions are so unreliable,” Hassett told “Meet the Press.”
He added that the Trump administration is now working to understand why such large revisions were made in previous months to the jobs numbers.
“There were people involved in creating these numbers,” Hassett said. “If I were running the BLS and I had a number that was a huge, politically important revision, the biggest since 1968—actually, revisions should be better, right, because computers are better and so on—then I would have a really long report explaining exactly what happened. And we didn’t get that.”
In his interview with CBS, Greer acknowledged that there were always revisions of job numbers, “but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways.”
The jobs report was issued as the Trump administration signed an executive order imposing tariffs on U.S. imports from countries including Canada, Brazil, India, and Taiwan, in his latest round of levies as countries scrambled at the last minute to seek ways to reach better deals on trade.
Trump said that India, in particular, would face tariffs because of its economic ties with Russia and because the country has long purchased Russian-made military hardware. This comes as the White House negotiates with the Kremlin over its war in Ukraine.
Greer and Hassett both said in their interviews on Aug. 3 that the bulk of those tariffs are likely to stay in place rather than be cut as part of continuing negotiations.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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